global supply chain

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The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

We examine how political changes and technological innovation gave rise to global supply chains. An analysis of “best practices” in supply chain management shows how these supply networks are vulnerable to systemic risk. We then seek to identify ways to make supply networks more resilient. This chapter’s conclusion draws lessons for systemic thinking from supply chain management and considers how the resilience and robustness of the system may be improved. GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS We begin by considering the rise of global supply chains in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We show how political and technological changes shaped global trade and international relations and how supply chain management adapted to suit this new transnational environment.

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In a recent survey of international supply chain managers, McKinsey and Company found that product complexity and financial volatility were among the most important determinants of supply chain strategies.48 Their survey also documents that these professionals perceived supply chain risk as being greater in 2008 than in 2006. The risks that executives reported were linked to the difficulty of obtaining accurate information on the state of global supply chains, something that has become more difficult as globalization has made the world more complex. The executives emphasized that substantial resources are required for the management of global supply chains. These findings are consistent with the results from a separate, more extensive survey conducted among three hundred global manufacturing companies by the Massachusetts-based consultancy PRTM.49 The company’s research found that some managers today actually believe that outsourcing is an impediment to competitiveness under certain circumstances as a result of its negative impact on resilience, going against the core of lean management philosophy.

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We have shown that connectivity in both the financial sector and the real economy has increased dramatically in the twenty-first century and that global governance has failed to match the speed of global integration. The resulting governance gap has led to systemic risk in the financial sector and to instability in the global supply chain network. Global supply chains and financial systems operate on the foundation of increasingly sophisticated infrastructure networks. Infrastructure includes the freight and travel networks touched on in chapter 3 but also the world’s energy grid and the information superhighway that has given us the World Wide Web.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

It is not countries as a whole that ascend value chains but such circuits of people who are attached to global nodes. Gradually, places such as garment production centers in Dhaka and Addis Ababa begin to feel almost detached from their own country even as they become key drivers of its growth; they belong as much to the global supply chain as to their nation. So synchronized are global supply chains that they serve as a seismograph of our amplified connectivity. Like earthquakes causing equally powerful aftershocks, the financial crisis of 2008 contracted world trade five times more severely than it did world GDP. First the credit crunch created a demand shock, meaning a huge slump in purchases of durable goods.

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This trend is playing out around the world from East Africa to Southeast Asia as dynamic new regional federations take shape through common infrastructures and institutions. North America too is growing into a truly united supercontinent. Third, the nature of geopolitical competition is evolving from war over territory to war over connectivity. Competing over connectivity plays out as a tug-of-war over global supply chains, energy markets, industrial production, and the valuable flows of finance, technology, knowledge, and talent. Tug-of-war represents the shift from a war between systems (capitalism versus communism) to a war within one collective supply chain system. While military warfare is a regular threat, tug-of-war is a perpetual reality—to be won by economic master planning rather than military doctrine.

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Supply chains are the complete ecosystem of producers, distributors, and vendors that transform raw materials (whether natural resources or ideas) into goods and services delivered to people anywhere.*7 Whether you are awake or asleep, scarcely a moment of our daily lives—sipping morning coffee, driving a car, talking on the phone, sending an email, eating a meal, or going to the movies—doesn’t involve global supply chains. And yet as universal as they are, supply chains are not things in themselves. They are a system of transactions. We do not see supply chains; rather, we see their participants and infrastructures—the things that connect supply to demand. What we can see, however, by tracing supply chains link by link is how these micro-interactions add up to large global shifts.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

The same year, a young man called Robin Zeng made his way to southern China, to the bustling coastal city of Dongguan in southern Guangdong province near Hong Kong, which was embracing capitalism and openness to the world, despite the widespread crackdown on political speech that followed the Tiananmen violence. For an ambitious young man in 1989 moving to Dongguan was like heading to the centre of the world, a place becoming connected to global supply chains where workers lived in crowded dormitories and could watch Hong Kong TV. In the city, which a few years earlier had been farmland and rice paddies, foreign investors were being encouraged by the local government to invest in manufacturing enterprises. Dongguan attracted significant Taiwanese, Hong Kong and other foreign investment in factories, and acted as a magnet for Chinese migrant workers (Dongguan’s population doubled in the 1980s).

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While Tesla and Elon Musk got all the attention, the real growth was going to come from China, where the government had launched generous subsidies for EV purchasers. In 2015 China launched an ambitious plan to dominate future technologies, called ‘Made in China 2025’, which was a significant government-led effort to decouple China from global supply chains and support indigenous innovation. One of the key sectors was electric vehicles. That led to a rapid expansion in Chinese battery capacity. Over seventy percent of new battery cell capacity was being built in China.9 ‘It is not unusual to go to a battery factory and to be standing in the first of maybe one or two battery production lines but in the meantime, they have already installed sheds three through to eight and they are backfilling equipment and starting commissioning some of them,’ he said.10 Brinsden believed China would ‘surprise the world’ with the battery revolution.

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‘We are poised to become a central actor in the creation of the new electrical world economy,’ Óscar Landerretche, the former chairman of Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, owned by the Chilean state, told me in the company’s grand dark-panelled wooden offices in central Santiago. The Atacama is the beginning of a global supply chain that enables all our digital lives – from iPhones to iPads and laptops. It is a reminder that for all our ability to live on our smartphones and store our data in the cloud we have still not moved beyond digging up finite minerals from the earth to meet our needs. As Max Planck once observed: ‘Mining is not everything, but without mining everything is nothing.’1 In early 2016 I was picked up in the dusty mining town of Calama, where copper miners once spent the fortunes they made from feeding China’s insatiable demand for the metal in the mid-2000s.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Economist Dani Rodrik and others argue that hyperglobalization, democracy, and national sovereignty create an “inconsistent trilemma.” To maintain democracy and sovereignty, hyperglobalization needs to be curtailed. More recently, as the consequence of the COVID-19 crisis and the ensuing disruptions to global supply chains, logistics, and transportation networks, calls for reshoring or friend-shoring of manufacturing and global supply chains have become louder and more popular. Indeed, global pandemics that spread faster because of globalization have first led to draconian restrictions of the movement of people—as during the peak of COVID-19—when foreign travel became nearly impossible and is still hampered.

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Mounting evidence began suggesting as much in 2021 to anyone following the financial news. Inflation, the precursor to stagflation, flared up thanks to the COVID-19 shock, which was both a negative supply and demand shock. The COVID-19 recession led to massive and unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus in 2020–21 that, together with global supply chain bottlenecks, commodity price surges, and a shrinkage in labor supply, nudged inflation rates to levels not seen since the 1980s. Things got worse in 2022, when some observers hoped that the fading of the COVID-19 contagion would reduce the supply bottlenecks that cause inflation. Instead, the Russian invasion of Ukraine raised the price of commodities that Russia and Ukraine supply: oil and natural gas, industrial metals, fertilizers and agricultural goods.

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Instead, the Russian invasion of Ukraine raised the price of commodities that Russia and Ukraine supply: oil and natural gas, industrial metals, fertilizers and agricultural goods. Then the Omicron variant of COVID-19 struck China. A draconian Zero-COVID policy forced the shutdown of entire cities that are major hubs for business, trade and transportation. This further clogged global supply chains. When goods are scarce, prices rise. Inflation climbed in advanced economies and emerging markets. Severe droughts heightened concerns about access to food, a prescription for volatility. Poor crops in Russia and Ukraine and a drought in parts of the Middle East sparked food riots in 2010 that launched the Arab Spring.

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 9: THE DARK SIDE OF TECHNOLOGY 1.Although it is worth noting that we may be close to reaching the physical limits of miniaturization: quantum mechanics suggests life could become a lot less certain. 2.The phrase ‘mass production’ wasn’t coined until the 1920s. It originally referred to the Ford Motor Company. 3.For a useful summary of the evolution of global supply chains, see R. Baldwin, Global Supply Chains: Why they emerged, why they matter, and where they are going, Centre for Trade and Economic Integration Working Paper CTEI-2012-13, Graduate Institute, Geneva, 2012. 4.Lord Reith, director general of the BBC between 1927 and 1938, was keen to deliver to his audience ‘All that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement … The preservation of a high moral tone is obviously of paramount importance.’ 5.Winston Churchill appeared to thrive on alcohol in ways that would likely be unacceptable today, yet he was rarely criticized.

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Where David Ricardo’s comparative advantage applied, countries would have ended up specializing in some areas and exiting from others.10 In other words, there would have been both winners and losers in the US labour market, even if overall economic activity had ended up at a higher level (labour standards across the region would also have ended up higher, one reason why TPP’s demise comes at considerable cost).11 Where global supply chains were formed, specialist production would have been concentrated in some countries, and would have disappeared from others: again, there would have been labour market disruption even if the pie had increased in size. Meanwhile, countries integrated into Asian supply chains that had not signed up to TPP would have found themselves excluded from those supply chains in the future: for them, the playing field would not so much have been levelled, but rather tilted dramatically against them.

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Yet without the information technology revolution, it is difficult to imagine that the world would have experienced anything like the degree of globalization witnessed since the 1980s. At a stroke, the nineteenth-century coordination problem – which led to a concentration of industrial activities in a limited number of areas – was removed. Global supply chains took over. Apple could design its iPhone in California, yet make it in China, courtesy of FoxConn. BMW could build its Minis in Oxford, yet have the engines made in Brazil. JP Morgan could package up US sub-prime mortgages, knowing that the bundles it had assembled could then be distributed to Norwegian pension funds.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

In recent years, corporate leadership has rightly prioritized addressing cyber risks, the threat of technological obsolescence, and the consequences of a jobless underclass as a result of increased automation. However, there are now mounting concerns that something more fundamental is at risk. Many observers have begun to wonder whether global supply chains—a critical factor in the success of many multinational corporations—will continue to function as they once had. Over the past fifty years, multinational corporations have built and relied on global supply chains to source goods from low-cost regions and sell them in other countries for higher prices. This drove the success of many companies—catalyzing their profits by lowering costs, helping to drive global GDP, and underpinning the economic success of many emerging economies such as China’s.

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The prospect of seeing the profit gains of low-cost production all but wiped out is just another strand boardrooms must confront. Ultimately, companies are left with a choice between absorbing these higher costs or passing them on to the consumer. Yet another threat to global supply chains is the emerging “splinternet”—an increasingly fragmented internet with competing China-led and US-led platforms. This technological fragmentation has the potential to dramatically disrupt global supply chains by eliminating centralized procurement and thereby raising costs and reducing the efficiency gained from shared global services. Furthermore, a balkanized internet promises to increase the complexity of companies’ operations and erode their ability to respond quickly to market forces.

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If today’s global economic and political system is upended, boards will have to rethink their business models or risk failure. The prevailing globalized economy has allowed corporations to tap relatively cheap capital, deploy it around the world, and garner higher returns (the carry trade), while hiring and recruiting the best talent internationally. Multilateralism has significantly lowered the costs of global supply chains, enabling companies to manufacture goods in low-cost environments and sell them at higher prices in developed markets—as Apple has done with its iPhones. This has driven trade and investment, and thus economic growth, at a global scale to levels not previously seen. But in a rapidly de-globalizing world, these benefits could quickly disappear.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Machines are becoming defter and software is becoming cleverer, and these improvements are increasing the set of human tasks that can be cheaply automated. At the same time, the digital revolution has supercharged a second force: globalization. It would have been nearly impossible for rich Western firms to manage the sprawling global supply chains that wrapped around the world over the last twenty years without powerful information technology. And while China and other emerging markets might have become better integrated in the world economy even without companies such as Apple scattering production across the globe, such growth would have been much slower and less dramatic.

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Electrification upended all sorts of industrial processes, and also gave us electric light, telephone calls and rock music. The digital revolution is no exception to this pattern. The web causes hardship for publishers precisely because it is so good for news consumers, who now enjoy access to massive amounts of information at very low cost. The global supply chains enabled by information technology have been hard on some workers but very good for shoppers as a whole, who now enjoy cheaper electronics, clothing and toys as a result. One marvels at the pure, massive consumer surplus generated by something like Wikipedia. When I was a kid, there were still people who would knock on your door to try to sell you encyclopedias, and school essays often needed to be written in a library, where you could easily turn to the Britannica on the shelves or dig through the card catalogue, looking for just the right source.

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But property rights have been secure enough to satisfy lots of multinational firms, who have been willing to contract with Chinese companies or invest directly in the Chinese economy. Yet the role of foreign capital points to a second force at work in China’s rise, without which Chinese liberalization would have generated far more meagre returns. Over the last generation, technological change enabled explosive growth in global supply chains. Supply-chain trade has had far-reaching consequences for global development. Success in export markets once required economies to develop an entire suite of capabilities. To export electronics or cars, South Korea and Japan needed to build an entire, high-quality supply chain domestically: they needed lots of firms capable of designing and manufacturing components, and well-organized corporations capable of planning and coordinating the design, production and sale of complex goods.

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

From the beginning of his tenure, Lenny pursued a “value-enhancing strategy” focused on shifting production and related activities away from the company via outsourcing.51 Indicative of this effort, Hershey outsourced elements of production of its chocolate liquor—the chocolate core of products like Kisses—to other companies, leaving only final reassembly steps to its own facilities and workforce. As a further extension of that strategy, the company announced its “global supply chain transformation” in February 2007. The official objective of the three-year program could not be a clearer statement of fissuring as applied to supply chain strategy. “The transformation program will result in a flexible, global supply chain capable of delivering Hershey’s iconic brands, in a wide range of affordable items and assortments across retail channels in the company’s priority markets.”52 The plan entailed further reducing the number of Hershey’s own production lines, “outsourcing production of low value-added items” to other companies, and building a new production facility in Monterrey, Mexico.

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This included a more aggressive stance toward the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco, and Grainmillers Union, which represents Hershey’s workers. In 2002 the breakdown in negotiations over wages and benefits led to a forty-four-day strike. Although the parties settled the strike, the longer-term effort to reduce jobs continued. 52. See “Hershey Announces Global Supply Chain Transformation,” PR Newswire, February 15, 2007 (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hershey-announces-global-supply-chain-transformation-57933727.html, accessed July 21, 2012). 53. In addition to corporate documents and contemporaneous accounts, this section is based on Cleeland (2009). 54. Weekly stock price increases outpaced the Dow Jones Industrial Average consistently from 2002 through the first half of 2007.

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Compliance, Commitment and the Improvement of Labor Conditions in Global Supply Chains.” Politics and Society 27, no. 2: 319–351. Locke, Richard, Greg Distelhorst, Timea Pal, and Hiram Samel. 2012. “Production Goes Global, Standards Stay Local: Private Labor Regulation in the Global Electronics Industry.” MIT Political Science Department Research Paper No. 2012–1. Locke, Richard, Fei Qin, and Alberto Brause. 2007. “Does Monitoring Improve Labor Standards? Lessons from Nike.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 61, no. 1: 3–31. Locke, Richard, and Monica Romis. 2007. “Improving Work Conditions in a Global Supply Chain.” Sloan Management Review 48, no. 2: 54–62.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

The robots could still be coming,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-deal-port-dockworkers-automation-ilwu-union-permit-245-maersk-robot-jobs-20190628-story.html. some portion of the workers within an industry: Cole, “The Tip of the Spear.” choke points in the global supply chain: Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness, eds., Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain (London: Pluto Press, 2018). full pensions: Andrea Bernstein, “Why 80K People Applied for 2,400 Positions at LA’s Ports,” KPCC, June 5, 2017, https://www.scpr.org/news/2017/06/05/72573/why-80k-people-applied-for-2-400-positions-at-la-s.

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The shocks to the supply chain that were to come would only accelerate this dispersion of manufacturing capacity across the globe, wresting from mainland China its monopoly on the creation of countless objects. This is not to say that the world’s multinationals, and Vietnam itself, were ready. In the immediate aftermath of the black dawn of the coronavirus, manufacturers tested the hypothesis that factories outside China could protect them from shocks to global supply chains, and in many cases found it wanting. What so many companies couldn’t get around, no matter where their factories were located, was that the parts and materials that are fed into today’s factories still so often come from China. Manufacturing in the twenty-first century isn’t material in, finished products out, as it was in the days of Bethlehem Steel and Henry Ford.

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These workers, many of whom have specialized skills and knowledge even if their work is technically blue-collar, have the ability to shut down that much more economic activity should they choose to walk off the job. At ports, this is especially true, since they are, as has been amply demonstrated through the power of striking transportation workers all over the world, choke points in the global supply chain. Thus, for workers whose skills are especially in demand, think of coders in Silicon Valley, or sufficiently well organized, like unionized dockworkers, automation can make them more powerful, not less. The more than 7,000 full ILWU members who work at the Port of Los Angeles have translated that power into salaries in excess of $100,000 a year, free health insurance, and full pensions.

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Then there was a revolution, thanks to the emergence of international supply chains. Foreign investors and global companies now consider suppliers in a poor country an integral part of their own business and it is in their own commercial interest to invest massively in their productivity. This is one reason why many countries that have been integrated into global supply chains – not least through much-maligned low-wage factories and ‘sweatshops’ – have been able to skip several stages of development and grow at a record pace. Once you have built factories, roads and ports to manufacture and transport clothes and toys, you can then also use them to produce and export high-tech components.33 Surprisingly, this spread of technology has gone hand in hand with stronger local protection for intellectual property.

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When the crisis comes You might think yes, yes, all that sounds nice, as long as everything goes smoothly, but then there are pandemics, natural disasters or wars and then we need the government. In desperate times, politicians need exceptional powers to get us to behave properly and produce what is needed. A common interpretation is that the pandemic showed that we can’t rely on global supply chains where tens of thousands of people across the globe manufacture our face masks, protective equipment and medical technology. Like China, many countries now think they should have had large domestic production, or at least have large stockpiles full of protective equipment like Finland did. We must ‘limit our dependence on other countries,’ said EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides.

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New trade barriers were created, a large part of the workforce stayed at home while others were forbidden to cross national borders, and deliveries to the restaurant industry collapsed at the same time as demand for other food supplies soared when shoppers became preppers. The incredible thing about your shop shelves was that almost nothing happened. Through round-the-clock work to change suppliers, reallocate labour, adjust production methods and redirect transportation, the food industry managed to rebuild global supply chains in just a few weeks. It is an absolutely amazing achievement and we consumers noticed almost none of it. It was not done by any food tsar who dictated what everyone should do. It worked because it was not a centralized process. Each adjustment of the processes was based on local knowledge of what could be done in a particular place with the available raw materials and the workforce present – and what they could stop doing without creating catastrophic shortages elsewhere.

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

Bales of raw cotton came in by sea from far-off lands and were transformed by miraculous machines—combing, tight weaving, and precision dyeing—into thread, cloth, and finally clothes. Then those goods were sent off through the same channels to markets around the world. It was a glimpse of the future: global supply chains, competitive advantage, and automation made a once-unremarkable city the center of the global textile trade. Impressive as the new manufacturing machines were, the supply networks that fed them were equally important. Bigger, more efficient factories needed more and cheaper raw materials—not just cotton from Egypt and the Americas, but dyes and silk from Asia and eventually mineral resources such as iron ore and coal.

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Manufacturing has now become just another “cloud service” that you can access from Web browsers, using a tiny amount of vast industrial infrastructure as and when you need it. Somebody else runs these factories; we just access them when we need them, much as we can access the huge server farms of Google or Apple to store our photos or process our e-mail. The academic way to put this is that global supply chains have become “scale-free,” able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Samsung. The non-academic way to say it is this: nothing is stopping you from making anything. The people now control the means of production. Or, as The Lean Startup author Eric Reis puts it, Marx got it wrong: “It’s not about ownership of the means of production, anymore.

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People should do only what they do best, he said, and trade with others who make other specialized goods. No one person or town should try to do it all, since a society can do far more collectively with an efficient division of labor—comparative advantage plus trade equals growth. What was good in the eighteenth century is even better in the twenty-first, now that specialists have access to global supply chains for their commodity input materials and global consumer markets for their niche output products. Nearly thirty years ago, two MIT professors, Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, predicted this transition in a book titled The Second Industrial Divide. They argued that the mass-production model that defined twentieth-century manufacturing economies (the “first industrial divide” between people and production) was neither inevitable nor the end of innovation in making things.

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

Membership expanded from 18 members at inception, to 84 members in 1980, to 164 members today (fig. 2.10).20 Also helping to fuel increasing trade have been falling communication and transportation costs. The greater access to information afforded by computerization and the Internet makes it far easier to do business across borders. Technological changes have also enabled global production processes, by solving the complicated logistical puzzles of global supply chains. Finally, economic growth abroad has also increased international trade flows, which tend to increase with the size of the economy. For the United States and more broadly the world, the importance of trade in the overall economy has grown by about 50 percent relative to its level in 1980.

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US auto producers would similarly face higher prices for imported auto parts. Apple, Intel, and other globally integrated corporations would also see increased costs due to trade frictions. Further, a US decision to cut imports would negatively affect our nation’s own production, given that many products manufactured abroad draw on global supply chains in which US producers participate as suppliers. For example, in the goods we import from Mexico, a very large share of the value is made up of US content.6 For that matter, it turns out that the US firms who are the biggest exporters are also often the biggest importers. It is difficult to reduce imports without creating collateral damage.7 Figure 3.2: Imports Help the Boeing 787 Fly Reprinted with permission from Reuters Graphics, Thomson Reuters Markets LLC.

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Again, it is difficult to truly disentangle these two sources of labor market disruption, especially as international trade and technological change fuel each other. Globalization allows quicker technological diffusion, and competitive forces encourage labor-saving innovation. Technological change enables globalization by lowering communication costs and creating solutions to the logistical puzzles of global supply chains. Figure 4.5: Almost Everywhere, the Manufacturing Share of Employment is Falling Data sources: International Labor Comparisons, US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monopoly and Excess Profits in the Global Economy As Chapter 2 showed, excess profits also play an important role in this story of workers’ woes.

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

Let me emphasize that this was a total coincidence: this was a “what if” scenario playing out in a computer model of US society, featuring a made-up virus. They chose a coronavirus for the simulation partly to show how disruptive even a relatively mild virus can be. They succeeded. The result of the simulation was what we are living out now: overwhelmed health care, disrupted global supply chains, needless death, economic dislocation. And a table full of officials from government and industry sitting there saying, If this were to happen, there’s not much my sector/department/office could do. And the people who wrote that simulation were going easy on the officials—maybe so they’d sit through the entire afternoon and not be so horrified they’d quietly slip out at the coffee break, trying to forget what they’d seen.

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But as the villages become more tightly coupled, both may suffer when one is attacked. A loose network absorbs shock; a tightly coupled one transmits it. That is happening in the Covid-19 pandemic. Countries go into lockdown; people stop shopping, traveling, and producing; and the effects ricochet through a tightly coupled global economy. The global supply chains of money, materials, people, energy, and component parts that underpin industries falter and break. Airlines go under as they are not set up to weather even a temporary disappearance of travelers. Malaria worsens in Africa as insecticide and antimalarial bed net deliveries falter. Microcredit that underpins small businesses throughout the developing world defaults because payment collectors are locked down, causing ramifications throughout an economy.

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In the future, if deliveries depend more on automated systems, trucking may not remain as vulnerable—but the principle remains that if certain hub industries are paralyzed by loss of people, the impact can be far-reaching. There will be other choke points that depend on people: doctors and nurses, engineers who run power grids or essential manufacturing, or global supply chain managers are not all readily replaced. Even transient absences of key workers can cause snowballing problems. During Covid-19 lockdowns, oil refineries are shutting due to plummeting demand as air and road traffic fall. In a pandemic with a high loss of people, absence of workers at oil refineries starts becoming a problem.

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

If Peru were as effective at port management as Australia, the World Bank estimated, that alone would increase its foreign trade by one-quarter. If it cannot be, it will receive the maritime equivalent of branchline service on a single-track railway. The big containerships that link national economies in the global supply chain, carrying nothing but stacks of metal boxes, will pass it by.16 Global supply chains were not in anyone’s mind in the spring of 1956. Over the next half century, freight transportation developed in ways that could not have been imagined by the dignitaries watching the Ideal-X take on those first containers at Port Newark. Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the remarkable history of the box is that time and again, even the most knowledgeable experts misjudged the course of events.

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Workers in China produced her statuesque figure, using molds from the United States and other machines from Japan and Europe. Her nylon hair was Japanese, the plastic in her body from Taiwan, the pigments American, the cotton clothing from China. Barbie, simple girl though she is, had developed her very own global supply chain.1 Supply chains like Barbie’s are a direct result of the changes wrought by the rise of container shipping. They were unheard-of back in 1956, when Malcom McLean placed his first containers on board the Ideal-X, and in 1976, when high oil prices brought sky-high freight costs that stifled the flow of world trade.

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With modern communications and container shipping, the retailer could design its own shirts and transmit the designs to a factory in Thailand, which used local labor to combine Chinese fabric made from American cotton, Malaysian buttons made from Taiwanese plastics, Japanese zippers, and decorations embroidered in Indonesia. The finished order, loaded into a 40-foot container, would be delivered in less than a month to a distribution center in Tennessee or a hyper marché in France. Global supply chains became so routine that in September 2001, when U.S. customs authorities stepped up border inspections following the terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, auto plants in Michigan began shutting down within three days for lack of imported parts. The improvement in logistics shows up statistically in reduced inventory levels.

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Global and grassroots environmental groups focused their energies on getting states, networks of states, and intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations to implement restrictions to stop companies from dumping toxic waste in streams and rivers, clear-cutting forests, and belching exhaust into the atmosphere. Over the past decade and a half, this state-centered focus has shifted to a consumer-centered focus as fears stoked by globalization have changed the frame of environmentalism. In the age of global supply chains, free trade agreements, and capital flight, states have increasingly come to be seen as incapable of protecting their citizens from big global problems like ozone depletion, climate change, and biodiversity loss, and even more tractable problems, like controlling hazardous waste flows or regulating toxic substances in consumer goods.14 But while processes of globalization have delegitimized states and made citizens feel disconnected from the protective embrace of their respective governments, they have also helped to forge new, global identities based on feelings of “world-citizenship.”15 Westerners in particular have become uneasily aware of their power as consumers in shaping and driving global value chains.

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States, aside from the big players, appear weaker than ever (with less autonomy, power, authority), and their ability to tell corporations what to do is limited by their need for economic development and their membership in international bodies like the World Trade Organization that explicitly prohibit most environmental restrictions. On the flip side, transnational corporations are stronger than ever. One giant company, like Unilever or Walmart, affects millions of people around the world every day through its global supply chains. Free markets don’t exist, but maybe corporations are still the best, most sensible, way to heal the planet. They have reach, influence, and an unrivaled ability to coordinate action quickly. In Mackey’s story an enlightened corporation with a positive mission that honors all its stakeholders can heal the planet.

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The probusiness environmental message of the 1987 Brundtland Report, in combination with the weakened power of states to control the actions of corporations, have pushed big environmental NGOs to change their stance toward corporations over the past decade and to focus on the marketplace as the most viable lever of change.32 As Gerald Butts, CEO of World Wildlife Fund Canada, explains about WWF’s decision to partner with Coca-Cola: We could spend fifty years lobbying seventy-five national governments to change the regulatory framework for the way these commodities are grown and produced. Or these folks at Coke could make a decision that they’re not going to purchase anything that isn’t grown or produced in a certain way—and the whole global supply chain changes overnight.33 Big environmental groups may criticize neoliberalism and transnational corporations, but these days their strategic agendas look very similar to those of companies like Whole Foods and Walmart. The state is viewed as a suspect, ineffective force, while the firm becomes the key vehicle for change.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

By the nineteenth century, England, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, France, and Germany had established major colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, built upon what English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace termed “the unblushing selfishness of the greatest civilized nations.”1 The objective was to strengthen economic and political power by controlling key resources and strategic trading routes, and to deny these advantages to sovereign rivals. Over time, the colonies came to resemble modern global supply chains. In a thoroughly contemporary twist, Britain even outsourced the management of its colonies to private interests, the British East India Company. Colonialism provided access to low-cost raw materials, fueling the growth and prosperity of the Old World. It provided cheap labor, often in the form of slaves, and new markets for the products of the colonial powers.

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The Y2K software problems fueled the development of India's software industry. The new economy was centered on China, now the world's factory, exporting around 50 percent of its output. It imported resources and parts that were then assembled or processed and shipped out again. Smaller emerging economies, especially in Asia, became integrated into new Sino-centric global supply chains. Consultant David Rothkopf highlighted the uneven balance of power within emerging markets: “Without China, the BRICs are just the BRI, a bland, soft cheese that is primarily known for the whine [sic] that goes with it…”8 China was now the largest purchaser of iron ore and other metals, and one of the biggest purchasers of cotton and soybeans.

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They were the result of greater risk-taking, underwritten by the government, in institutions that were seen as too big or too important to fail. In effect, they were the beneficiaries of large, hidden transfers from other parts of society. Increased international trade, improvements in transport and information technology, and the development of global supply chains further altered the structure of labor markets, increasing inequality. Businesses in developed economies lowered costs by outsourcing labor-intensive production to low-cost locations, retaining the more profitable operations requiring higher skills. This allowed the firms to increase their earnings at the expense of workers.

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris

always be closing, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, commoditize, data acquisition, digital map, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, if you build it, they will come, intangible asset, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knapsack problem, late fees, linear programming, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Netflix Prize, new economy, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, RFID, search inside the book, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply-chain management, text mining, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, traveling salesman, yield management

At a polymer chemicals company, many of the company’s products had become commoditized. Executives believed that it was important to optimize the global supply chain to squeeze maximum value and cost out of it. The complexity of the unit’s supply chain had significantly increased over the previous couple of years. Responding to the increased complexity, the organization created a global supply chain organization, members of which were responsible for the movement of products and supplies around the world. In the new organization, someone was responsible for the global supply chain, there were planning groups in the regions, and then planners in the different sites.

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Amazon.com’s business model, in contrast, requires the company to manage a constant flow of new products, suppliers, customers, and promotions, as well as deliver orders directly to its customers by promised dates. With one of the most complex supply chain problems in business, Amazon.com recruited Gang Yu, a professor of management science and a software entrepreneur who is one of the world’s leading authorities on optimization analytics, as the head of its global supply chain. Yu and his team began by integrating all the elements of their supply chain in order to coordinate supplier sourcing decisions. To determine the optimal sourcing strategy (determining the right mix of joint replenishment, coordinated replenishment, and single sourcing) as well as manage all the logistics to get a product from manufacturer to customer, Amazon.com applies advanced optimization and supply chain management methodologies and techniques across its fulfillment, capacity expansion, inventory management, procurement, and logistics functions.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Adapt R&D R&D engineers also need to take full advantage of digitised and flexible supply chain assets and processes when designing products. Three conditions should be in place: Products must be factory-agnostic; in other words, it should be possible to produce them in any factory in the manufacturer’s global supply chain. For instance, John Deere, a US agricultural and construction machinery manufacturer, has an operating model, Design Anywhere Build Anywhere (DABA), which allows it to shift production quickly and seamlessly from one factory to another, depending on relative capacity. R&D should use fewer, more standard components so they can be assembled faster on the shop floor.

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La Ruche’s nationwide network of over 500 “hives” brings together a critical mass of local customers, giving them direct access to locally produced fresh, seasonal and ecofriendly foods. By cutting out the middleman, La Ruche’s network connects 50,000 members directly to over 2,500 small farmers. Large corporations and big-box retailers run global supply chains that deliver economies of scale that are increasingly unsustainable (such as selling bananas all year around). Collective buying platforms, by contrast, focus on large-scale localisation by supporting small-circuit supply chains that reduce time and distance between production and consumption, and are thus more sustainable environmentally, financially and socio-economically.

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., Caterpillar to Expand Manufacturing and Increase Employment in the United States with New Hydraulic Excavator Facility in Victoria, Texas, Caterpillar press release, August 12th 2010. 7Wong, H., Potter, A. and Naim, M., “Evaluation of postponement in the soluble coffee supply chain: A case study”, International Journal of Production Economics, Vol. 131, Issue 1, May 2011, pp. 355–64. 8O’Marah, K., chief content officer, SCM World, and senior research fellow at Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum, interview with Navi Radjou, March 11th 2014. 9Beasty, C., “The Chain Gang”, Destination CRM, October 2007. 10Morieux, Y., “As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify”, TED Talk, October 2013. 11Lopez, M., CEO, Lopez Research, interview with Navi Radjou, March 28th 2014. 12O’Connell, A., “Lego CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp on leading through survival and growth”, Harvard Business Review, January 2009. 13“The Return to Apple”, All About Steve Jobs: http://allaboutstevejobs.com/bio/longbio/longbio_08.php. 14O’Connell, op. cit. 15Francis, S., CEO, Flock Associates, and former head of Aegis Europe, interview with Jaideep Prabhu, January 27th 2014. 16This case study is adapted from an original version that appeared in French in L’Innovation Jugaad, published by Diateino in 2013.

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, additive manufacturing, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Free Software Foundation, game design, global supply chain, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lifelogging, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off grid, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, TED Talk, the long tail, the market place

The process of moving materials and parts around the world generates large amounts of pollution. Wal-Mart estimates that about 80 percent of its corporate carbon footprint is generated by its vast and global network of suppliers. Global supply chains move raw materials to the factory, then to the assembly line, and finally, to the last stop, the consumer. All of us rely on the flow of global supply chains. Nearly every mass produced object we live with, purchase, consume and throw away—from the most humble plastic toy to the medical device that saves lives in surgery—is the product of a long and winding supply chain.

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Fortunately, the student seemed satisfied with my answer, but his question made me wonder what his generation will witness in their lifetimes. Today 3D printing is already becoming a mainstream tool in industries such as aerospace engineering where product lines involve small batches of complex parts. In the future 3D printing will disrupt the economy in more profound ways. Global supply chains will be replaced by agile and independent small manufacturers able to respond quickly to fluctuating inventories and market demands. Less directly, perhaps the biggest contribution of 3D printing technologies to the economy will be to reduce the risk and friction associated with trying out new business models.

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Some metal manufacturing methods leave 90 percent of the raw metal behind in waste byproduct. For example, it can take up to 15 kilograms of raw metal to make a 1 kilogram airplane part.4 Since their goal was to study the carbon footprint generated over an entire product lifecycle, researchers studied the downstream impact of 3D printing on the global supply chain. Manufacturing could be greened if companies used digital inventory and local, just-in-time production—a de-centralized manufacturing model that 3D printing is ideally suited for. The Atkins Study concluded that “The application of AM for suitable parts and components, especially those that are of low volume but high value, can result in a significant reduction in stock costs and inventory levels.”

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Big Tech, California gold rush, Cape to Cairo, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, energy transition, global supply chain, Google Earth, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, private military company, Scramble for Africa, social distancing, tech baron, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

By the time one traces the chain from the child slogging in the cobalt mine to the rechargeable gadgets and cars sold to consumers around the world, the links have been misdirected beyond recognition, like a con man running a shell game. This system of obfuscating the severity of exploitation of poor people of color at the bottom of global supply chains goes back centuries. Few people sitting for breakfast in England in the 1700s knew that their tea was sweetened by sugar harvested under brutal conditions by African slaves toiling in the West Indies. The slaves remained far removed from the British breakfast table until a band of abolitionists placed the true picture of slavery directly in front of the English people.

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Consider the first sentence, because this is the important one. If the OECD and its constituents concede that 70 percent of 72 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt “has some touch” with child labor, that would imply that half of the cobalt in the world was touched by child labor in the Congo. This fact alone indicted a preponderance of the global supply chain of cobalt, yet child labor was far from the only problem in the Congo’s artisanal mining sector. How much of the Congo’s cobalt was “touched” by the hundreds of thousands of Congolese people suffering the consequences of toxic exposure to cobalt, uranium, lead, nickel, mercury, and other heavy metals?

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They all played their roles, but they were also symptoms of a more malevolent disease: the global economy run amok in Africa. The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, and devalued humanity of the people who toil at the bottom of global supply chains. Declarations by multinational corporations that the rights and dignity of every worker in their supply chains are protected and preserved seem more disingenuous than ever. The translator for my interviews, Augustin, was distraught after several days of trying to find the words in English that captured the grief being described in Swahili.

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Landlocked and completely surrounded by its much larger neighbor, South Africa, it has few natural resources and a population of only 2 million. With these scare resources, it has to contend with the third-highest rate of HIV infection in the world.9 But even here, Chinese factories have found a niche due to Lesotho’s favorable position under US trade policy. As a result, Lesotho has become a link in the global supply chain that churns out the yoga pants and T-shirts ubiquitous in the United States. A world apart from both Nigeria and Lesotho, Kenya is the flagship economy of East Africa, boasting its own brand of entrepreneurship and innovation. Although youth unemployment has been worrisome and security concerns about neighboring Somalia lurk, Kenya’s GDP has grown consistently at a robust 5–6 percent a year over the past five years, and its burgeoning tech sector has earned Nairobi the moniker “Silicon Savannah.”

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That year alone, 14,000 out of 50,000 garment workers lost their jobs as factory after factory shuttered its doors.2 If such an event were to repeat itself today, Mrs. Shen would have little room to maneuver—her factory’s small size and the lack of pricing power that clothing contractors command mean that she would be unable to raise prices in order to maintain margins. Indeed, the clothing industry is now dominated by a global supply chain within which Mrs. Shen’s factory is but one small link. Designs are made by retailers in the United States, Europe, and other developed countries. These are the brand names we’ve all heard of—Levi’s, Kohl’s, Reebok, Walmart. Those retailers go to a few giant sourcing firms (one expert I spoke to called them Big Sourcing), located mainly in Hong Kong and Taiwan, to get an agreement to have their designs made by a specified date and at a specified price.

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See also labor-intensive production cardboard box factory, 89–91 cash flow, 118 celadon, 21 Central Bank of Kenya, 144, 145 Central Bank of Lesotho, 68 Chang, Leslie, 100 Chaplin, Charlie, 100–101 Chen, Jennifer, 62–63, 115–116, 126 China African exports to, 109–110 African factories of, 5–8 economic development in, 18–19, 21, 161–163 economic slowing in and African industrialization, 171–172 Four Great Families in Nigeria from, 34–35 GDP in, 2–3, 29–30 governance and governance development in, 129–134, 147 government aid to Africa, 179n7 Great Leap Forward, 28 immigration to Africa from, 32, 167–169, 181n1 industrialization of, 1–3 investment in Africa, 42–44 labor costs in, 92 match between Africa and, 167–168 migrants from, 123–127 negative effects of factories in, 8 outward turning by, 173–177 pharmaceutical industry, 161–163 plastic wrap in, 28–29 poverty in, 180n10 size of economy in, 179n2 textiles smuggled from, 40–41 China Road and Bridge Corporation, 175–177 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 129 clothing manufacturing automation in, 172 competition among, 71–72 failure rates in, 114–115 global supply chain and, 55–57 infrastructure and, 62–63 labor requirements of, 54–57 in Lesotho, 7, 49–50, 53–54, 67–69, 71–72 local ownership of factories in, 113–119, 188n5 partnerships in, 114–117 textiles vs., 52 unions in, 102–105 See also textile manufacturing Coca-Cola, 138 colonialism, 129 commitment, personal, 32–33, 45–47, 70–71, 85, 167–169 commodity prices, 65 competitor sets, 52–53 corruption, 7–8, 74, 130 in manufacturing, 74–81 in Nigeria, 39, 40–41, 63, 75–78, 136–140 Corruption Perceptions Index, 77 Côte d’Ivoire, 120 cultural differences, 97–98 customers, 52–54, 65 Dangote, Aliko, 10 demand, changes in, 65 demographics, 92–94, 181n11, 190n14 Deng Xiaoping, 29–30, 175 Department for International Development, UK, 82, 154 diversity, 51–54 Doctors Without Borders, 158–159 donor fatigue, 158–159 Dutch disease, 36 East Asian miracle, 29 Ebola virus, 158 economic development, 106–107 bootstrapping, 132–136, 147–148, 165–166 China, 18–19, 28, 29–30 East Asia, 29 education and, 4–5 endowment theory of, 9–10, 135–136 flying geese theory and, 27–29 future of, 174–177 industrialization and, 12–13, 20 leapfrogging, 22 overconfidence for, 165–166 Washington Consensus on, 20–22 education, 4–5, 30, 95–96 worker skills training, 129–134, 148–150 Edwards, Lawrence, 57 efficiency, 46–47, 71–72, 118 employment, 43–44, 89–107 benefits of manufacturing, 94–96 cultural differences and, 96–98 difficulty of factory, 91, 100–101 fluctuations in, 57, 64 full, 91, 93 informal sector, 94 labor- vs. capital-intensive production and, 51, 52 learning manufacturing through, 17–19, 23–26, 89–91 of locals vs. expatriates, 57, 92–93, 184n5 stability in, 60–61, 64 of youth, 130 enabling context, 135 endowment theory of development, 9–10, 135–136 environmental issues, 7–8, 70, 74, 75, 81, 175–177 ethics issues, 159–160 Ethiopia, 11, 73 factory ownership in, 113 local ownership in, 120–123 pharmaceutical industry, 121–123, 156–157, 163–169 Eubank, Nicholas, 140–141 European Union, 53–54 exchange rates, 36–37, 54, 56, 65 FAW, 2, 5–6, 12 flexibility, 146–148 flip-flops, 46–47, 63 flying geese theory, 9, 23–30, 93, 112–113 Fokuo, Isaac, 129–132 Ford Foundation, 82 foreign investment, 33–34, 42–44, 73–74 Formosa denim mill, 57–61, 64, 184n6 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, 137 Four Asian Tigers, 29 Frederick, Kenneth, 79–81 French, Howard, 97 Gap, Inc., 117 Gates Foundation, 154 GDP from African manufacturing, 41 China, 2–3, 29–30 Ghana, 41 Lesotho, 62, 184n13 manufacturing and increased, 26–27 Nigeria, 36, 62 gel capsules, 121–123 Germany, pharmaceutical industry in, 156, 192n12 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 99 Ghana, 41 GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), 166, 167, 194n37 global competition, 37–39, 40–41, 70, 71–74 Global Corruption Barometer, 137 Global Fund, 154, 159 Goodall, Jane, 129 governance, 22, 82 bootstrapping development and, 132–136 good enough, 129–150 improving through using, 136–142 innovation and, 142–148 Nigerian customs agency and, 136–140 prevailing views on, 134–136 government development of with industrialization, 82–84 enforcement capacity and, 79–81 export-oriented manufacturing and, 63–64 loans, 65 Nigerian textile manufacturing and, 35, 37–39, 53 pharmaceutical industry and, 164–165 regulatory systems, 70, 74–75 in shaping manufacturing sectors, 65–66 Washington Consensus on, 20 Gu, Barry, 67–69, 84–85 Han, Jason, 138–140 hardships, willingness to endure, 167–168.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

But once again he produced compelling reporting and vivid phrases (though the trope about the flattening of the world became a little tiresome). He was one of the first Western journalists to write extensively about companies such as Infosys (he came up with the book’s title during a brainstorming session with one of the company’s founders, Nandan Nilekani). He grasped the importance of global supply chains as well as global communications—and produced fascinating accounts of the internal operations of companies such as Walmart and UPS to illustrate his point. And once again Friedman acted like an enthusiastic tour guide to the future, introducing us to the companies that are inventing the future and giving us a few minutes of face time with the new masters of the universe.

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In The Next American Frontier (1983) he blamed America’s economic woes on its “paper entrepreneurialism”—its preference for financial gamesmanship over making and improving things—and called for more protectionism. But then he produced a series of articles and books that challenged the left to rethink some of its basic assumptions. In “Who Are We?” he demolished the case for protectionism in a world of global supply chains. What does it mean to protect the “American” car industry when the components of the average car are made all around the world? In The Work of Nations (1991) he argued that a country’s competitiveness depends on its human capital—on the education and skills of its population—rather than on the profitability of the companies that happen to have their headquarters within its borders.

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Muscular emerging-market champions such as India’s ArcelorMittal in steel and Mexico’s Bimbo in baked goods are gobbling up Western companies. Brainy ones such as Infosys and Wipro are taking over office work. And consumers in developing countries are getting richer faster than their equivalents in the West. In some cases the traditional global supply chain is being reversed: Embraer buys many of its component parts from the West and does the high-value-added work in Brazil. Old assumptions about innovation are also being challenged. People in the West like to believe that their companies cook up new ideas in their laboratories at home and then export them to the developing world, which makes it easier to accept job losses in manufacturing.

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

When Molycorp hits its stride at the end of 2012, it expects to be processing 20,000 tonnes a year of oxide, in what it calls its “mines to magnets” strategy. Molycorp also owns a rare-earth processing facility in Estonia, one of only two such plants in Europe. The United States is keen to see a steady supply of strategically critical materials coming from its own mines or from friendly nations. “Diversified global supply chains and multiple sources of materials are required to manage supply risk,” the Department of Energy noted in its December 2010 report. “This means taking steps to facilitate extraction, refining and manufacturing here in the United States, as well as encouraging additional supplies around the world.”2 Industry expert Jack Lifton of Technology Metals Research says that whatever actions the United States takes, the focus must be on the security of the U.S. supply chain for rare earths, and their availability.

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It is the main supplier for a variety of rare-earth elements and other scarce metals such as antimony, tungsten, mercury, carbon (graphite), and bismuth.1 That gives it enormous weight in any discussion of what happens next. The United States, Europe, Japan, and India are all big consumers of various commodities and in some cases—such as coal, conventional oil and shale oil/gas in the United States, and coal in India—have substantial supply capacity. But none will dominate global supply chains in the way that China seems likely to do, over the next 20 years. This presupposes, of course, that there is no social implosion in China that leads to a splintering of the country into coastal, hinterland, northern or southern empires. The major long-term task of the expected new team of Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang when they take over as president and premier in 2012–2013 will be to manage continued high economic growth without any further breakdown in social harmony.

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Expansion of the Pilbara iron ore region in Western Australia, where BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Fortescue Metals Group, and Hancock Prospecting could lift combined output to almost 1 billion tonnes a year by 2020. Chinese and Japanese groups are major investors. 17. The Mount Weld rare earths mine, Western Australia. Along with Molycorp of the United States, Lynas Corp. is considered the most likely of the many rare earth miners outside China to get finished product into the global supply chain. 18. The brine-based lithium deposits of the “Lithium Triangle,” where Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina meet. Salar de Atacama in Chile is the most productive salt pan, but Bolivia has high hopes for its Salar de Uyuni. 19. The Belo Monte dam in Brazil, due for completion after 2015. Hydropower is a big contributor to Brazil’s energy mix, but Belo Monte raises environmental hackles in the same way as China’s Three Gorges Dam and the various Upper Mekong dam projects. 20.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

the company said that the prototype’s use had generated $6.5 million: Andrew Sawers, “Foxconn Uses Blockchain for New SCF Platform after $6.5m Pilot,” SCF Briefing, March 17, 2017, http://www.scfbriefing.com/foxconn-launches-scf-blockchain-platform/. Blockchain-proven digital tokens point to what blockchain: Michael J. Casey and Pindar Wong, “Global Supply Chains Are About to Get Better, Thanks to Blockchain,” Harvard Business Review, March 13, 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/03/global-supply-chains-are-about-to-get-better-thanks-to-blockchain. Belt and Road Blockchain Consortium: https://www.beltandroadblockchain.org/. Some have described it as a Beijing-led Marshall Plan: “China’s One Belt, One Road: Will It Reshape Global Trade?”

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But, as painful as that would be for the company’s reputation, the reality was actually worse: Chipotle had no way to pinpoint where the dangerous virus got into its food offerings; it only knew that it came from one of its many third-party beef suppliers. Five months later, the best management could come up with was that it “most likely” came from contaminated Australian beef. At the heart of the problem was the lack of visibility that Chipotle—like any food provider—has over the global supply chain of ingredients that flow into its operations. That lack of knowledge meant that Chipotle could neither prevent the contamination before it happened, nor contain it in a targeted way after it was discovered. Supply chains are composed of distinct, inherently independent businesses. Their interests align around the goal of maximizing the sale of an end product—the makers of transistors, chips, capacitors, screens, and other components of a Samsung smartphone will, for example, gain if Samsung experiences rising demand.

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To tackle this problem, Regenor’s team at Moog has launched a service it calls Veripart, which uses blockchain technology to, among other things, verify the software design and upgrading work performed by different providers of 3D-printed products along a supply chain. It plans to incorporate a host of features that, among other things, will protect intellectual property and make it more flexible and dynamic as an asset. The team at Moog plans to invite all members of its far-flung global supply chain to participate. Meanwhile, defense contractor Lockheed Martin, one of Moog’s biggest customers, has also seen the light with regard to blockchain’s value in secure work processes within this highly sensitive industry. The company announced that it has entered into a joint venture with Virginia-based GuardTime Federal to integrate blockchain technology into its supply-chain risk management.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

. ▪▪▪ Swabia in the 21st century, is in many ways as wealthy as it has ever been, with high wages, low unemployment, and many leisurely activities. The beautiful city centers of Ravensburg and Friedrichshafen in no way resemble the sorry state they were in in 1945. Ravensburg still provides a welcome for refugees, but this time the wars are further afield. Even the city's puzzle game manufacturer has adapted to a world of global supply chains and jigsaws disrupted by digital gaming. But the puzzle the people of this region, its drivetrain and jigsaw manufacturers, and other societal stakeholders here and in other parts of the world have to solve is not an easy one. It is a global one, with many complex and interdependent pieces.

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Despite this, economists today don't regard this era as one of true globalization. Trade had certainly started to become global, and the search for new trade horizons had even been the main reason for starting the Age of Discovery. But the resulting global economy was still very much siloed and lopsided. The European empires set up global supply chains, but most of these were limited to their own colonies and areas of control. Moreover, the colonial model was chiefly one of exploitation. Not only were local civilizations and societies subverted and dismantled, but the slave trade was integral to the new colonial economy. The empires had thus created both a mercantilist and a colonial economy but not a truly globalized one: the exchanges that happened on a global scale were not mutually beneficial or even agreed upon by all parties involved.

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At the same time, new technologies from the Third Industrial Revolution, such as the Internet, connected people all over the world in an even more direct way. The orders Keynes could place by phone in 1914 could now be placed over the Internet and delivered through a global network of large ships, trains, and planes. Importantly, members of the middle class had access to the goods produced in the global supply chain. Global trade was no longer a luxury. Instead of having them delivered in a few weeks, they would arrive at one's doorstep in a few days. What was more, the Internet also allowed for a further global integration of value chains. You could do R&D in one country, sourcing in others, production in yet another, and distribution all over the world.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

. ▪▪▪ Swabia in the 21st century, is in many ways as wealthy as it has ever been, with high wages, low unemployment, and many leisurely activities. The beautiful city centers of Ravensburg and Friedrichshafen in no way resemble the sorry state they were in in 1945. Ravensburg still provides a welcome for refugees, but this time the wars are further afield. Even the city's puzzle game manufacturer has adapted to a world of global supply chains and jigsaws disrupted by digital gaming. But the puzzle the people of this region, its drivetrain and jigsaw manufacturers, and other societal stakeholders here and in other parts of the world have to solve is not an easy one. It is a global one, with many complex and interdependent pieces.

…

Despite this, economists today don't regard this era as one of true globalization. Trade had certainly started to become global, and the search for new trade horizons had even been the main reason for starting the Age of Discovery. But the resulting global economy was still very much siloed and lopsided. The European empires set up global supply chains, but most of these were limited to their own colonies and areas of control. Moreover, the colonial model was chiefly one of exploitation. Not only were local civilizations and societies subverted and dismantled, but the slave trade was integral to the new colonial economy. The empires had thus created both a mercantilist and a colonial economy but not a truly globalized one: the exchanges that happened on a global scale were not mutually beneficial or even agreed upon by all parties involved.

…

At the same time, new technologies from the Third Industrial Revolution, such as the Internet, connected people all over the world in an even more direct way. The orders Keynes could place by phone in 1914 could now be placed over the Internet and delivered through a global network of large ships, trains, and planes. Importantly, members of the middle class had access to the goods produced in the global supply chain. Global trade was no longer a luxury. Instead of having them delivered in a few weeks, they would arrive at one's doorstep in a few days. What was more, the Internet also allowed for a further global integration of value chains. You could do R&D in one country, sourcing in others, production in yet another, and distribution all over the world.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Or maybe the CEO himself? Or maybe that factory worker wasn’t bribed, but blackmailed? Or maybe he was a CIA line officer all along? The opportunities to sabotage the global supply chain were endless, Gosler told me. My mind also darted back to Times headquarters, to Sulzberger’s closet, to one of those two classified NSA documents Glenn Greenwald was so hesitant to give up—the one that laid out, in intelligence jargon, how the NSA was spiking the global supply chain. The document was a 2013 NSA intelligence budget request, outlining all the ways the agency was circumventing encryption on the web. The NSA called it the SIGINT Enabling Project, and the vast reach of the agency’s meddling and incursion into the world’s digital privacy was disguised in typical agency lingo: The SIGINT Enabling Project actively engages the US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs.

…

Right above those states in this taxonomy were the Tier III and IV adversaries, who trained their own teams of hackers but also relied on outside contractors to discover zero-day vulnerabilities, write exploits, deploy them on a target, and “make hay,” as Gosler put it. And above those states were the “big dogs,” as Gosler called them, the Tier V and VI nation-states who spent years and billions of dollars finding mission-critical zero-days, developing them into exploits, and—in a feat of glory—inserting them into the global supply chain. The only difference between Tier V states and Tier VIs, Gosler told me, was that the VIs were doing all of this on a massive, push-button scale. At that time, at least, the only countries capable of that level of sabotage were Russia, China, and—though he would never say it—the United States.

…

I asked how he’d figured out how to hack the world’s most protected networks. “It’s easy,” he told me. “They never anticipated they would be attacked.” Chip manufacturers hired the Gaucho to make sure that their chips were secure. He’d discovered all sorts of ways one could hack chips to get into the global supply chain. He showed me how to hack a chip with a “side channel attack,” sending malware via radio emissions to the copper in the chip itself. There were at least ten of these chips now in every device. “It’s hard to find one that’s been compromised,” he told me—albeit not impossible. The Gaucho had come across other hackers’ handiwork before.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

While the impact of global trade on workers has in recent decades been profoundly uneven – an issue we return to in Chapter 3 – the gains to consumers have been immense, with specialization helping to significantly lower the price of many goods. It is cities that have made this possible, and without them, the complex networks of global supply chains we so rely upon would quickly unravel. Invention While specialization allows societies to make the most of resources given the current state of technology, it is the power of invention that truly pushes the frontier. Thanks to technological progress, billions of people around the world are now able to achieve a level of material comfort that would have been unimaginable only a few centuries ago.

…

Rather than opening the economy to foreign influence all at once, the Chinese leadership established ‘Special Economic Zones’ in four coastal cities – Shenzhen, Shantou, Zhuhai and Xiamen – in which foreign multinationals were offered tax incentives and a more business-friendly operating environment in exchange for establishing export manufacturing facilities. The rapid success of these early experiments led to the designation of a raft of ‘Open Coastal Cities’ in 1984 that integrated China into global supply chains. As in Japan and Korea, China’s booming population presented a potential hurdle for its transition to a prosperous urban society. By the late 1970s fertility rates had already fallen to around three children per woman, thanks to a combination of concerted government media campaigns and the development of China’s own version of the contraceptive pill.30 However, with rapidly falling mortality rates, the population by 1980 had already hit one billion people, having nearly doubled since the Communist Party took power in 1949.

…

Bangladesh has established itself as a major manufacturer in the labour-intensive garment industry thanks to its abundant and cheap workforce.64 But robots capable of sewing could soon pull the rug out from underneath Bangladesh’s manufacturing sector.65 For poor economies that have not yet started on the journey, the prospects look even more bleak. With many rich countries actively looking to bring a greater share of manufacturing back home in a bid to keep voters happy and reduce reliance on global supply chains, the challenge is likely to grow. In the absence of the traditional path to industrialization, what other avenues for development are available? Many poor countries blessed with attractive scenery or a warm climate will continue to benefit from tourists. But the jobs this sector creates tend to be relatively low paid, and many poor countries do not have the beaches of Thailand or the wildlife of Tanzania.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

• The fastest-growing region for mobile broadband penetration is Africa, which leapt from 2 percent penetration in 2010 to 20 percent in 2014.5 THE GLOBALIZATION OF TRADE AND FINANCE—AND VACCINES When working well, global integration provides families and businesses in developing countries with more choices, options, and opportunities for progress. For poor people living on subsistence incomes, the availability of cheaper goods boosts their effective income. Whatever income they have goes further. At the same time, integration creates new markets for exports that can accelerate growth and raise incomes. Global supply chains allow firms to specialize more narrowly, build expertise in specific areas, and sell goods and services into larger global markets, all of which helps create jobs. Telecommunications technologies allow developing countries to provide services—such as backroom accounting or call centers—that didn’t exist a few decades ago.

…

Similarly, horticulture producers in Uganda and Kenya rely on air transportation to fly fresh-cut flowers grown in greenhouses located near their airports to markets in Europe, where the flowers can be sold on the streets the next morning. FIGURE 7.3: AIR TRAVEL IS MUCH CHEAPER Real Cost per Mile in the United Sates Source: “Annual Round-Trip Fares and Fees: Domestic,” Airlines for America. More important, cheaper airfares mean that people can move much more easily, and with them ideas and knowledge. Global supply chains benefit from managers and engineers connecting on the internet and by cell phones, but also from the ease with which people can move from one city to the next for planning and problem solving. Businesses are much more connected and integrated because people can move so easily. Inexpensive airfares also have been crucial to the growth of tourism.

…

More extensive trade, and the skills and technologies that come with it, will continue to be a major driver of growth in the decades to come. In a more globalized world, businesses in developing countries will look for opportunities to specialize, find niche markets, and integrate themselves into global supply chains. Financial and insurance markets need further development, since access to finance remains a major constraint for many businesses, especially small ones. In many countries, considerable scope remains for reducing tariff and other trade restrictions. In others, limited amounts of protection may be helpful in some circumstances, especially if tariffs are time limited and applied in sectors where firms can become competitive quickly.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

I then hopped to the very different island of Manhattan, spending four years at the United Nations on the team writing the annual flagship Human Development Report, while witnessing barefaced power games block progress in international negotiations. I left to fulfil a long-held ambition and worked with Oxfam for over a decade. There I witnessed the precarious existences of women – from Bangladesh to Birmingham – employed at the sharp end of global supply chains. We lobbied to change the rigged rules and double standards governing international trade rules. And I explored the human-rights implications of climate change, meeting farmers from India to Zambia whose fields had been turned to bare earth because the rains had never come. Then I became a mother – of twins, to boot – and spent a year on maternity leave, immersed in the bare-bum economy of raising infants.

…

Thanks to the scale of global income inequality, responsibility for global greenhouse gas emissions is highly skewed: the top 10% of emitters – think of them as the global carbonistas living on every continent – generate around 45% of global emissions, while the bottom 50% of people contribute only 13%.43 Food consumption is deeply skewed too. Around 13% of people worldwide are malnourished. How much food would it take to meet their caloric needs? Just 3% of the global food supply. To put that in context, 30%–50% of the world’s food gets lost post-harvest, wasted in global supply chains, or scraped off dinner plates and into kitchen bins.44 Hunger could, in effect, be ended with just 10% of the food that never gets eaten. From these examples it is clear that getting into the Doughnut calls for a far more equitable distribution of humanity’s use of resources. A third factor is aspiration: whatever people consider necessary for a good life.

…

Acemoglu, D. and Robinson, J. (2013) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. London: Profile Books. 45. Goodman, P. (2008) ‘Taking a hard new look at Greenspan legacy’, New York Times, 8 October 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/business/economy/09greenspan.html?pagewanted=all 46. Raworth, K. (2002) Trading Away Our Rights: women workers in global supply chains. Oxford: Oxfam International. 47. Chang, H-J. (2010) 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, London: Allen Lane. 48. Ferguson, T. (1995) Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. London: University of Chicago Press, p. 8. 49.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

I took the machine in with all the wonder of a seven-year-old. Until then, I had only seen computers depicted in TV shows and movies. Here was one I could touch. But it was more remarkable, I think now, that such a contraption had even got to a small suburb of Lusaka in Zambia in the 1970s. The global supply chain was primordial, and remote shopping all but non-existent – and yet the first signs of the digital revolution were already visible. The build-it-yourself kit piqued my interest. Two years later, I got my own first computer: a Sinclair ZX81, picked up in the autumn of 1981, a year after moving to a small town in the hinterlands beyond London.

…

And new technologies, and the businesses built on them, often need large numbers of people interacting with each other in close proximity – something only cities can offer. As the twenty-first century unfolds, the localising potential of technology will only become more powerful. The coronavirus pandemic which began in 2020 showed how fragile global supply chains could be. But if it was a virus in 2020, it could be war or extreme weather – exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change – in the future. The result is an era in which, once again, geography matters – with economic activity set to become increasingly local. There is an irony here. The economic paradigm that brought about the Exponential Age, globalisation, has fostered technologies that will lead to a return to the local.

…

Analysts at the Dutch bank ING reckon it might eliminate up to 40 per cent of world imports by 2040.23 This sum is colossal – an estimated $22 trillion – and will wipe out a decade’s growth in the trade of goods and services. And if such proximate, distributed manufacturing did take hold, it would transform the whole nature of the global supply chain. UPS, the preeminent global logistics company, has already started to invest in technologies that will enable it to print parts that its customers need in a trice – instead of delivering packages across the world.24 Thanks to the compounding effect of these technologies, finished products won’t need to be shipped from Mexico or Bangladesh; they can be printed in a nearby facility.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Writing in the early weeks of the pandemic, the author Zachary Karabell concluded that once we examine the data more closely, “we are likely to find fresh confirmation of what we already know about globalization: that it’s easy to hate, convenient to target and impossible to stop.” The current anti-globalization argument is that we are all too intertwined, our lives and economies so entangled that we have lost control over our own destiny. One particular element of this concern is that in an emergency like Covid-19, global supply chains make us vulnerable to critical shortages in medical goods. The new conventional wisdom is that some things must be manufactured locally. It is hardly the first time we have seen renewed anxiety about the loss of control that accompanies a bewildering global economy. In the late 1960s, Harold Wilson, as prime minister of Great Britain, faced pressures from international markets and vowed to resist the “gnomes of Zurich.”

…

At the height of the pandemic in mid-March 2020, the arteries of world trade narrowed and clogged up. With far fewer flights, the per-pound cost of transporting goods across the Pacific tripled. Seeking security, many governments—from the EU to Japan to India—announced their resolve to pursue greater self-sufficiency, or at least make the system of global supply chains more resilient. Even previously committed globalists suddenly began talking about “reshoring.” In a national address, French president Emmanuel Macron lamented his country’s “dependence on other continents,” and announced his new post-pandemic goal would be to achieve the “independence of France” in technology and industry.

…

The US president largely dismissed international warnings about the disease, and when he finally acted, did so unilaterally, not even bothering to inform his closest European allies before announcing travel bans on those countries. Predictably, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and India’s Narendra Modi—populist nationalists like Trump—approached the pandemic with a similar distrust of any kind of global efforts or multilateral solutions. Modi reminded Indians of the dangers of global supply chains and urged that they be “vocal for local,” buying and promoting all things Made in India. But the pandemic seems to have brought out nationalism even in places where one would least expect it, like Europe. Nationalists like to point out that multilateral cooperation didn’t stop the pandemic.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

As Priscilla Moriuchi, the director of strategic threat development at a Massachusetts cybersecurity company, has warned, “It’s the technologies of the future and technologies of future security systems that could be the biggest security threat in the Belt and Road project.”32 All of these efforts amount to a bewildering mix of corporate deal-making and state-sponsored extortion. They traverse a tangle of undersea cables, next-generation wireless networks, and global supply chains. But broadly speaking, we can break China’s back-end strategy for dominating the Internet into four main components: controlling the production, controlling the pipes, controlling the protocols, and controlling the post-4G future. To help make sense of how these four puzzle pieces fit together, consider the many steps involved in sending a simple email.

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If you turn it over—you might have to take off that cracked iPhone cover—you’ll see the words “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” This inscription hints at the first piece of the back-end puzzle. Even as China seeks to control the world’s Internet networks, it already grasps many of the networks that build the networks—our global supply chains. As with the hardware that spirits our emails and search queries around the globe, most of us rarely spare a thought for the complex global web that produces everything from computers to cars. Still fewer likely dwell on where so many of these supply chains lead. More often than not, the answer is the warehouses and factory floors of China.

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The application layer transforms that data into what you see on your web browser or email client. All of these layers work together to make sure that the right data gets to the right place in the right fashion.103 China’s aggressive effort to win the back-end battle is not limited to the gleaming factories that make up our global supply chains or the cables buried deep beneath the sea and the earth. Beijing’s ambitions also reach into decidedly less glamorous locations: the bureaucratic and buttoned-down multilateral bodies where technical standards are hammered out. Because in addition to controlling the production and the pipes, China is steadily gaining influence over network protocols.

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

Achieving a higher standard of living with fewer demands on natural and labor resources will help ease price pressures and continue this decade’s good news on inflation,” wrote the Dallas Fed’s economists in 1998.4 The promises of “mass customization” they dangled before their readers’ eyes in 1998 are coming to pass, including TV shows on demand so viewers, not schedulers, determine the evening’s viewing; or clothing made-to-measure for the midmarket many, not just the wealthy few. Separate statistical headaches arise from the increasing complexity of the economy, due to the fact that most goods are now “made” in global supply chains. The components will be manufactured in a number of countries, shipped around the world to be assembled in one place, and shipped back out to their destination markets. This is true of goods as apparently simple as a shirt or as sophisticated as an iPhone.5 China, of course, has been the main country of assembly in these global chains, but other Asian countries and their Latin American competitors Brazil and Mexico have been gaining ground.

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See financial intermediation services indirectly measured Fitoussi, Jean-Paul, 118, 139 Fleming, Alexander, 63 Ford, Henry, 45 France, 8–9, 103 Frank, Robert, 112 free market ideology, 93 Friedman, Thomas, 95–96 Gagarin, Yuri, 47 Geary-Khamis dollars, 52 Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), 116, 137 Georgiou, Andreas, 1–2, 4 Germany, 17, 41–42, 71 Ghana, 32, 53, 94, 107 Gilbert, Milton, 15, 50 globalization, 93–94 global supply chains, 125 Golden Age, 43, 56 Gosplan, 29 government expenditures (G), 27–29 government role in economy, 14–17, 19–21, 23, 63–66, 77–78. See also fiscal policy; monetary policy; policy and politics government services, 38–39 Great Depression, 12–13, 119, 121 Greece, 1–5, 72, 73, 138 Greenspan, Alan, 83, 88, 94, 102 Gross Domestic Product (GDP): adjustments and reforms of, 92, 117, 136–38; availability of country data on, 78; calculation issues in, 2, 32–34, 52–54; circular flow model of, 26–27, 27f, 57, 63; complexity of, 24–25, 28–31; concept of, 4–5, 24–31 (see also purpose and meanings of); country comparisons of, 42; criticisms of, 5, 14, 104, 110–11; future of, 121–40; GNP vs., 25; “gross” component of, 25, 30; HDI correlated with, 73–74; importance of, 1–6, 42, 135–36; information gathering for, 33, 37, 51–53, 137–38; international comparisons of, 48–57; issues facing, 121–35; loans influenced by, 3; origins of, 7, 16–18, 119–20; postwar, 43–45, 43t, 62–63; purpose and meanings of, 5–6, 92, 121, 136, 138–40 (see also concept of); recommendations concerning, 136–40; revisions of, 36; spending-income relationship in, 30, 33–34; statistical patterns in, 3; well-being and welfare correlated with, 111, 117, 136; well-being and welfare not measured by, 5, 14, 40, 91–92, 111–14, 124–25, 136, 140 Gross National Product (GNP), 15–16, 25, 115–16 Guevara, Che, 68 Haldane, Andrew, 99, 101 happiness, 5, 6, 110–13, 136, 137.

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

That mentality is reflected in the title of a book by former Intel CEO Andy Grove: Only the Paranoid Survive.56 It is impossible to know the exact locations where all the components of a laptop were drilled for, mined, or made, because of the increasingly complex supply chain of the electronics industry, which the UN reports has the most globalized supply chain of all industries.57 But we do know that all the problematic mining practices described in the chapter on extraction—for gold and tantalum, as well as copper, aluminum, lead, zinc, nickel, tin, silver, iron, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, cadmium, and chromium—are involved. The brand name company—Dell, HP, IBM, Apple, etc.

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But ultimately, we must remember—as Allegheny College political science professor Michael Maniates says—the choices available to us as consumers are limited and predetermined by forces outside the shopping market. Those forces can best be changed through social and political activism.20 Trucks and Container Ships and Planes, Oh My! Ships, trucks, roads, planes, and trains are needed to move Stuff along this globalized supply chain. The transportation infrastructure consumes enormous quantities of fossil fuels and spews out waste, but these are some of the most hidden of externalized costs in consumer goods, and most people are completely unaware of them. Even those shoppers who are aware of the source of the materials in products, the ones who know to ask whether diamonds fueled violence in Africa or whether the cotton fields in Turkey used pesticides, rarely know what to ask about how goods are transported.

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United Parcel Service, or UPS, has launched trucks with hydraulic hybrid technology that are supposed to “increase fuel efficiency by 60–70% in urban use and lowers greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, compared to UPS’s conventional diesel delivery trucks.”41 Not to be outdone, FedEx has peppered its fleet with hybrid electric vehicles that decrease particulate emissions by 96 percent and go 57 percent farther on a gallon of fuel than a conventional FedEx truck, reducing fuel costs by more than one-third.42 DHL has launched its own version of carbon offsets, offering customers the ability to tack on a 3 percent extra fee that DHL promises to invest in “green projects like vehicle technology, solar panels and reforestation.”43 Nice as those efforts sound, they don’t get to the crux of the problem, which is this set of massive global supply chains (as long as ten thousand miles, according to some experts44), the consumer demand for more cheap Stuff delivered faster and faster, and the economic rules governing the whole show, which make it more profitable to make Stuff on the other side of the planet than close to home. With all of the above in mind, let’s look at the retail distribution of the same three items we zeroed in on last chapter.

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

This smile curve is also consistent with the trend called “servicification” of manufacturing since the total value being added in what looks like the manufacturing sector (the fabrication stages) is falling while the value being added in what look like service sectors is rising. SOURCE: Baldwin, “Global Supply Chains: Why They Emerged, Why They Matter, and Where They Are Going,” Centre for Economic Policy Research, Discussion Paper No. 9103, August 2012. Figure 18. Today, most Apple products are designed in California and Apple handles the marketing, distribution, after-sales service, and many add-on services via its App Store, iTunes, etc.

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Someone has to be in charge of getting each task done, so the next level is “occupations,” defined as the individual workers performing the task (often with the help of machinery). In most production processes, workers are placed close to other workers, which defines the third natural grouping: stages. In most cases, the second unbundling (which is to say offshoring) concerns stages of production, not occupations or tasks. SOURCE: Richard Baldwin, “Global Supply Chains: Why They Emerged, Why They Matter, and Where They Are Going,” in Global Value Chains in a Changing World, ed. Deborah K. Elms and Patrick Low (Geneva: World Trade Organization, 2013). Figure 11. The Specialization versus Coordination Tradeoff Deciding how to organize production is impossibly complex in the real world—that is, in the world of Mein Herr’s one-mile-to-the-mile-map world.

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Communication Technology (CT), however, is only one half of the ICT revolution. The other half concerns Information Technology (IT). As the discussion about production unbundling in Chapter 6 makes clear, both IT and CT affect the course of offshoring, but they work in opposite directions. When thinking about the future of global supply chains, we must speculate about the possibility of truly revolutionary IT developments. One such possible development relates to computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM). This is not futurology. It has already had a big impact. It has already produced a tectonic shift in manufacturing in high-wage nations—moving manufacturing from a situation where machines helped workers make things to a situation where workers help machines make things.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

The accelerations in global interconnectivity require an intuition reset on the part of companies. They must plan early to scale up globally, tailor business models to new markets, get to know new competitors, develop global talent, and prepare for shocks and volatility in an increasingly interconnected world economy. Businesses that focused mainly on cost effectiveness in global supply chains now need to consider how “value” chains may evolve—who the participants may be, which regions could play a role, and how value could shift along the value chain. Just as the introduction of electricity was an important factor in pushing the world’s industrialized economies into higher gear a century ago, the current of economic energy from global economic flows coursing through the system offers similar potential today.

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In fast-growing developing economies, more than 143,000 Internet-related businesses launch every year.57 Jumia, a Nigerian e-commerce company that now operates in Ivory Coast, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco, in 2013 became the first African winner of the World Retail Award for “Best Retail Launch of the Year.”58 M-pesa, a mobile-money service started in Kenya, is now disrupting traditional banking, payments, and money-transfer service providers across Africa. Build New Global—and Digital—Ecosystems Digital platforms enable companies to expand rapidly and profitably to customers further away from their home markets than was possible in the past. Building cross-border ecosystems ranging from global supply chains to innovation networks could help companies take advantage of this opportunity. Many companies are exploiting global interconnections and digital platforms to weave together networks of suppliers, distributors, and after-sales service providers—not just for procurement but also for preemptive maintenance that reduces production downtime, and for more efficient parts supply.

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., “The great rebalancing.” 43. Atsmon et al., “Winning the $30 trillion decathlon.” 44. Chatterjee et al., “The decade ahead.” 45. Tom Glaser, “2013 investor day,” VF Corporation, June 11, 2013, www.vf17×17.com/pdf/2013%20VFC%20Investor%20Day-Glaser%20Transcript.pdf; Gary P. Pisano and Pamela Adams, VF Brands: Global Supply Chain Strategy, Harvard Business School case number 610–022, November 2009, www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=38127. 46. Atsmon et al., “Winning the $30 trillion decathlon.” 47. Alejandro Diaz, Max Magni, and Felix Poh, “From oxcart to Wal-Mart: Four keys to reaching emerging-market consumers,” McKinsey Quarterly, October 2012. 48.

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

One of Gorman’s businesses was selling farming equipment and supplies. He found himself pitching agricultural equipment to Peter, who explained what his brother Lex was up to. Gorman invited Lex to Florida, where he owned an expansive waterfront property. Lex turned on the charm and explained his vision of a global supply chain finance business. By the end of their meeting, instead of Gorman selling tractors to Greensill Farming Group, Lex had persuaded the veteran businessman to invest in Greensill Capital. The company’s accounts show that Gorman, who joined the Greensill board, loaned the company about $24 million.

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Greensill quickly dropped the client, and earned the praise of Carnell again, which was followed by the usual sort of Greensill press release, this one touting the ombudsman’s praise. The whole episode was like a naughty child scolded by their parents for misbehaving, then earning faint praise for doing the right thing. Greensill was claiming credit for no longer helping its clients bully suppliers. IN AUGUST 2020, the Global Supply Chain Finance Forum, an industry lobby group, put out its own report on the industry bullies. The decision to speak out was a sure sign that the problem was significant, although the report predictably claimed that bullying was rare. Authored by the likes of the International Chamber of Commerce and the European Banking Association, the report clearly sought to put some distance between best practices and the kind of approach taken by some of Greensill’s clients.

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Index Aar Tee Commodities ref1 Abengoa ref1, ref2 Accenture ref1, ref2 Agritrade ref1 Ahearn, John ref1 AIG ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Aigis Banca ref1, ref2 Allesch-Taylor, Stefan ref1, ref2 Allin, Patrick ref1 anti-money-laundering (AML) questions ref1 ANZ ref1 Apollo Global Management ref1, ref2 Apple ref1 Aramco ref1 ArcelorMittal ref1 Archegos ref1 Arthur Andersen ref1 Asda ref1 Atlantic 57 Consultancy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Auditing Association of German Banks ref1 Augustus Asset Managers ref1 Austin, Jason ref1, ref2 Australia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19 Australian Taxation Office ref1 Aviva ref1 BAE Systems ref1 Baer, Julius ref1, ref2 BaFin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Bailey, Andrew ref1 Bank of America ref1 Bank of England ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Barclays ref1, ref2 Barnes, Rob ref1, ref2, ref3 Barrell, Neil ref1 Barron’s ref1, ref2, ref3 Bates, Chris ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Battershill, William ref1, ref2 Baylis, Natalie ref1 BBB see British Business Bank BBC News ref1 BBVA ref1 BCLP see Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner BDO ref1, ref2 Becker, Arthur ref1 Berkshire Hathaway ref1 Bethell, Richard, 6th Baron Westbury ref1, ref2 Bingera ref1 Bishop, Julie ref1, ref2 BlackRock ref1, ref2, ref3 Blackstone ref1 Blair, Tony ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bloomberg ref1, ref2, ref3 Bloomberg News ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bluestone Resources Inc. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Blunkett, David ref1, ref2 BNP Paribas ref1 Boeing ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 737 Max 8 aircraft ref1 Bond and Credit Company, The (TBCC) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Borbely, Barnabas ref1 Borneo ref1 Breedon, Tim ref1 Breedon report ref1 Brereton, Greg ref1 Brexit referendum ref1 Brierwood, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Brighthouse ref1 British Business Bank (BBB) ref1, ref2, ref3 British Gas ref1 Brown, Eliot ref1 Brown, Gordon ref1, ref2 Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner (BCLP) ref1 BSi Steel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Buckingham Palace ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Buffett, Warren ref1 Bundaberg, Queensland, Australia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Bunge ref1 Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy committee ref1 Cabinet Office ref1, ref2, ref3 Caillaux, Gabe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Callahan, Mark ref1 Cameron, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘Big Society’ policy ref1 and Earnd ref1 Greensill remuneration ref1 and Greensill’s collapse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 hired as Greensill adviser ref1, ref2 lends credibility to Greensill ref1 and Lex ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 and Mohammed Bin Salman ref1 and the pharmacy plan ref1 role at Greensill during the Covid-19 pandemic ref1 and The Bond and Credit Company ref1 Cameron, Samantha ref1 Cameron administration ref1, ref2 Cantor Fitzgerald ref1, ref2, ref3 Carillion ref1, ref2 ‘early payment facility’ ref1 Carlyle Group ref1 Carna ref1 Carnell, Kate ref1, ref2 Carney, Mark ref1 Carrington ref1 Carson Block ref1 Carusillo, Mickey ref1 Casey, Dame Louise ref1 ‘cash-less rolls’ ref1 Catfoss group ref1, ref2, ref3 central banks ref1 Chap (magazine) ref1 Charles, Prince ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Chase Manhattan ref1 CHBG Limited ref1 Chehaoduo ref1, ref2 Chelsea Group ref1 Chelsea Village ref1 Chicago Police Pension Fund ref1 Chilean mining ref1 Chubb ref1 Chuk ref1 CIMIC ref1, ref2 Citibank ref1 Citigroup ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 City, the ref1 Clarke, Tracy ref1 Clearbrook Capital ref1 Cleland, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 coal mining ref1, ref2, ref3 Coca-Cola ref1, ref2 CoFace ref1 Comerford, Robert J. ref1, ref2 Commerzbank ref1 Companies House ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Confederation of British Industry (CBI) ref1 Conservative government ref1, ref2 Copenhagen ref1 Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) ref1, ref2 Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS) ref1, ref2 corporate espionage ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Coupe, Mike ref1 Covid-19 Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF) ref1, ref2 Covid-19 pandemic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 government loan schemes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 restrictions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Crain’s (magazine) ref1 Credit Suisse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 and the Covid-19 pandemic ref1 and Greensill Capital ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33 and Sanjeev Gupta ref1 Crothers, Bill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Crown Representatives programme ref1 Cunliffe, Sir Jon ref1 CWB ref1 de Botton, Alain ref1 de Botton, Gilbert ref1 de la Rue, Tom ref1 Deal Partners ref1, ref2, ref3 Degen, Michel ref1, ref2, ref3 Dell ref1 Deloitte ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Demica ref1 Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy ref1, ref2 Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs ref1 Department of Health ref1 Department of Health and Social Care ref1 Department of Work and Pensions ref1 Deutsche Bank ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Deutsche Börse ref1 Doordash ref1 Doran, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 dotcom boom ref1, ref2 Dow Jones ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Downes, Brett ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Dragon Technology ref1, ref2, ref3 Eadie, Al ref1 Earnd ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Ecclestone, Bernie ref1 Edelman ref1 1860 Munich ref1 Ellis, Brett Easton, American Psycho ref1 Enterprise Investment Schemes (EISs) ref1 equity warrants ref1 Ernst & Young ref1 see also EY Euler Hermes ref1, ref2 European Banking Association ref1 Ewing, Fergus ref1 EY ref1, ref2 see also Ernst & Young Eyjafjallajökull ref1 factoring ref1, ref2, ref3 see also supply chain finance Fair Financial ref1, ref2, ref3 Fairmac Reality ref1 Fairymead ref1 Fan, Colin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Farrell, Maureen ref1 FCA see Financial Conduct Authority ‘fee ramp agreements’ ref1 Feeney, Chuck ref1 Ferrin, Ronald ref1 Fidelity ref1 5th Finger ref1 Finacity ref1 Financial Accounting Standards Board ref1 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Skilled Persons Reviews ref1, ref2 financial crisis 2008 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 aftermath ref1, ref2, ref3 and central banks ref1 and fintechs ref1 tougher regulations following ref1, ref2 Financial News (banking publication) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Financial Reporting Council ref1 Financial Times (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Finews (Swiss news site) ref1 ‘fintechs’ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Fitch ref1 ‘flash title’ ref1 Fleetsolve ref1 Food Revolution Group ref1 Forbes (magazine) ref1 Ford ref1 Ford, Bill ref1 Formula One ref1 ‘Four Eyes Principle’ ref1 FreeUp ref1, ref2 Friedman, Alex ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Galligan, Shane ref1, ref2 GAM Greensill Supply Chain Finance fund (GGSCF) ref1, ref2 Gapper, John ref1 Garrod, Neil ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 GBM Banca ref1 General Atlantic (GA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20 General Mills ref1, ref2, ref3 Gentleman’s Journal (magazine) ref1 German Deposit Protection Authority ref1 Global Asset Management (GAM) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26 Absolute Return Bond Fund (ARBF) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 regulators ref1 Global Supply Chain Finance Forum ref1 Global Trade Review (trade finance publication) ref1 Goldman Sachs ref1, ref2 Gorman, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Gottstein, Thomas ref1, ref2 government loans ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘GovTech’ firms ref1 Grant Thornton ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Gray, Sue ref1 Green, Philip ref1, ref2 Greenbrier hotel ref1 Greene, Stephen ref1 Greensill, Alexander ‘Lex’ David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 ambition ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ascent ref1 Australian property investments ref1, ref2 Australian tax obligations ref1 awards ref1, ref2, ref3 CBE ref1, ref2, ref3 birth ref1 and Carillion ref1 celebrity status ref1 childhood ref1, ref2 at Citigroup ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 on the Crown Representatives programme ref1 CV ref1 and Daniel Sheard ref1 and David Cameron ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 directorships ref1 double down strategy ref1, ref2 and Downes ref1 dresses the part ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Duncan Mavin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 eager to own bank ref1, ref2 education ref1 legal studies ref1 MBA at the Alliance Manchester Business School ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 and 5th Finger ref1 and Greensill Bank AG (formerly NoFi) ref1 and Greensill Capital ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 acquisitions ref1, ref2 aircraft leasing deals ref1 attempts to raise emergency finance ref1, ref2, ref3 avoids toughest regulators ref1 BaFin probe ref1 Bluestone ref1, ref2 BSi ref1 Covid-19 pandemic ref1, ref2, ref3 Credit Suisse involvements ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 demise ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Dragon Technology ref1 expansion ref1, ref2, ref3 ‘flak’ (PR advisers) ref1 General Atlantic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Global Asset Management ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 harmful effect of SCF on small businesses ref1 insurance ref1, ref2, ref3 malpractice ref1 multi-obligor programmes ref1 National Health Service venture ref1, ref2 new category of loans ref1 payroll finance ref1 perilous state ref1 premier ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 sells company private jets ref1 Softbank dealings ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 start-up ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Tower Trade ref1 Tradeshift Networks ref1, ref2 and Jeremy Heywood ref1 and John Gorman ref1 legal work ref1 marriage ref1 and Masayoshi Son ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 mentors ref1 mission statement, ‘helping out the little guy’ ref1 and Mohammed Bin Salman ref1 at Morgan Stanley ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 remuneration ref1 moves to the UK ref1, ref2 at OzEcom ref1 and politics ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘rewilding’ project ref1 risk-taking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 and Sanjeev Gupta ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 and Saudi Arabia ref1 sits on Bank of England committee on SCF ref1 skiing ref1 spending ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 takes loan from the Greensill family ref1 and Tim Haywood ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 at TRM ref1, ref2 wealth ref1 billionaire status ref1, ref2 hits the big time ref1, ref2 Greensill, Andrew (Lex’s brother) ref1 Greensill, Judy (Lex’s mother) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Greensill, Lloyd (Lex’s father) ref1, ref2, ref3 Greensill, Peter (Lex’s youngest brother) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Greensill, Roy (Lex’s grandfather) ref1, ref2 Greensill, Victoria (Lex’s wife) ref1, ref2 Greensill Bank AG (formerly NoFi) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and the Atlantic 57 loan ref1, ref2 and the BaFin probe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and the end ref1, ref2 and General Atlantic ref1 and government loans ref1 and Gupta ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 private aircraft ref1 regulation ref1 and Softbank ref1, ref2 technology ref1 and trade credit insurance ref1, ref2 whistle-blower at ref1 Greensill Capital ref1, ref2 aircraft leasing deals ref1 allegations of corruption at ref1 and the Atlantic 57 loan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 avoids toughest regulators ref1 and the BaFin probe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 and Bill Crothers ref1 billion dollar plus valuation ref1 and Bluestone ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and BSi ref1 business cards ref1, ref2 cash burner ref1 client list ref1 collapse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 corporate events ref1 corporate governance ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and the Covid-19 pandemic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 and Credit Suisse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33 Credit Suisse’s investigation into ref1, ref2, ref3 crisis mounts ref1, ref2, ref3 and David Cameron ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and David Solo ref1, ref2, ref3 defaults ref1, ref2 and Dragon Technology ref1 early backers ref1 early struggles ref1, ref2 evergreen loans ref1 ‘everyone wins’ pitches ref1 expansion ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 external public relations ref1, ref2 EY investigation into ref1 fault lines ref1 as ‘fintech’ company ref1, ref2 fraud and misconduct allegations ref1 and General Atlantic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15 and Global Asset Management ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22 gossipy culture ref1 and Greensill Bank ref1 and Griffin Coal ref1 and Gupta/Gupta Family Group ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14 harmful impact on small businesses ref1 headquarters on the Strand ref1 ‘High Risk Franchise Names’ document ref1 hits the big time ref1, ref2 illiquid investments ref1 insolvency ref1, ref2 investment protection ref1 investors abandon ref1, ref2 IPO ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 and John Gorman ref1 and Katerra ref1 and the Lagoon Park SPV ref1 launch ref1, ref2 lavish spending at ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Lex’s claims about ref1 liquidity ref1, ref2 and Lloyds ref1 loan book ref1 losses ref1 and Maurice Thompson ref1 Morgan Stanley employees ref1 and the NHS ref1, ref2, ref3 obligors ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 offices ref1, ref2, ref3 and payroll finance ref1 and Pemex ref1 perilous state ref1 and the pharmacy plan ref1 pre-IPO funding (‘Project Olive’) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 profitability issues ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 ‘reasonably permanent’ funding ref1 reducing the early risks of using ref1 remuneration ref1, ref2, ref3 retrenchment ref1, ref2 risk team ref1, ref2 risky ventures ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 and Roland Hartley-Urquhart ref1 and Saudi Arabia ref1 as ‘shadow bank’ ref1 and SoftBank ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24 SPAC talks ref1 start-up style management ref1, ref2 takes loan from the Greensill Capital family ref1 technology ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Tim Haywood ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 and Tower Trade ref1, ref2, ref3 and trade credit insurance ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 ‘Unicorn’ status ref1 and the US capital markets ref1 whistle-blower allegations emerge ref1 and the Wickham SPV ref1 Greensill Corporation Pty ref1 Greensill Farming Group ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Greensill Trust ref1 Grenda Investments ref1 Griffin Coal ref1, ref2 Gross, Bill ref1 Guazi ref1 Gulf Petrochem (GP Global) ref1 Gupta, Nicola ref1 Gupta, Sanjeev ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17 Australian property ref1 and Bluestone ref1 and the demise of Greensill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and German steel ref1 and Grant Thornton ref1 and Greensill Bank ref1 Gupta Family Group (GFG) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 and Bluestone ref1 and government loans ref1 and Greensill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 and Greensill Bank ref1 Guttridge, Jane ref1, ref2 Guy, Toby ref1 Gymshark ref1 Haas, Lukas ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Hambro, Jay ref1 Hanafin, Dermot ref1 Hanafin, Sean ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Harris, Piers ref1 Harry, Prince ref1 Hart ref1 Hartley-Urquhart, Roland ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Havens, John ref1, ref2 Haywood, Tim ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18 Henkel ref1 Hewlett Packard ref1 Heywood, Jeremy ref1, ref2, ref3 Highways Agency ref1 HM Revenue & Customs ref1 HM Treasury ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hobday, Neil ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Holmes, Elizabeth ref1 House of Lords ref1 HSBC ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Huawei ref1, ref2, ref3 Hutton Inquiry ref1 IAG see Insurance Australia Group ICBC Standard Bank ref1 Indonesia ref1 Industrial Cadets ref1 Inflexionpoint ref1 ING ref1 Insurance Australia Group (IAG) ref1, ref2, ref3 International Chamber of Commerce ref1 Intrepid Aviation ref1 ‘Iran Notices’ ref1 Iraq, UN weapons inspectors ref1 Isle of Dogs ref1 Jacob, David ref1, ref2, ref3 Jahama Highland Estates ref1 Jain, Anshu ref1 Jakarta ref1 Jardine Matheson ref1 Johnson, Boris ref1 Jones, Karen ref1 J.P.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

It was the same phenomenon that led Sornette (who cited Tainter’s work) to forecast a looming societal collapse—and Bar-Yam wholly agreed. “Complexity leads to higher vulnerability,” he told the New Scientist. “This is not widely understood.” Breakdowns in a highly complex system can spread due to the interlocking networks, like the global supply chain, which act like a vast complex ecosystem with myriad choke points. A car dealer in Rapid City can’t sell cars because Ford can’t get the computer chips it needs because a factory in Taiwan got flooded. A single container ship foundering in the Suez Canal disrupts supply chains worldwide. “The networks that connect us can amplify any shocks.

…

An extreme geomagnetic solar storm that could shut down critical electricity, GPS, and transportation infrastructure around the world for days or months. Accelerating global warming that acts as a risk multiplier amplifying wildfires, flooding, and other natural disasters. Animal disease. Food or critical resource failures, driving a global supply-chain shock. Widespread electricity failure. Widespread telecommunication failure. Widespread cyberattack. “While these scenarios often seem extreme, in our highly interconnected society they may be much more likely than people think,” Neal warned. CHAPTER 23 THE GREAT DILEMMA OF RISK Nassim Taleb lay sprawled in his bed on the top floor of a house in Beirut breathing through an oxygen mask.

…

In Skin in the Game, he wrote somewhat approvingly of Putin, arguing that his position as an autocrat who doesn’t face elections allows him to act “as a free citizen confronting slaves who need committees, approval, and who of course feel like they have to fit their decisions to an immediate rating.” “It turns out there’s no mild version of nationalism,” Taleb told me. The war triggered economic and financial cascades that rippled worldwide. Oil prices surged, providing another kicker to inflationary pressures that had started with Covid and its stranglehold on global supply chains. Stocks nose-dived, hitting bear-market territory in weeks. “The market is in a state of shock,” Brian O’Reilly, head of market strategy at Mediolanum International Funds, told Morningstar in March. Nickel prices doubled in a day amid jitters that the war would disrupt access to the metal—Russia was one of its biggest producers.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

By this offshoring-friendly definition, if a firm shuts down a factory in the US (GDP per capita in 2017: $59,500 in purchasing power parity) and opens a factory with much cheaper workers in China ($16,700) or Indonesia ($12,400) or Venezuela ($12,100), the resulting exports to the US market are “not from a low-wage country to a high-wage country.”12 In contrast with MGI, the Nobel laureate economist Michael Spence claims that “labor arbitrage has been the core driver of global supply chains for at least three decades—with significant distributional and employment effects.”13 According to the Commerce Department, between 1999 and 2009 US multinational corporations cut 864,600 workers in the US while adding 2.9 million workers abroad. Fifty-seven percent of the foreign hiring by nonfinancial companies was in Asia, with multinationals adding 683,000 workers in China and 392,000 workers in India.

…

Compared to more direct prolabor measures like minimum wages, collective bargaining and limits on global labor arbitrage, pulverizing the most productive firms in the economy is a very roundabout and inefficient way to try to raise wages, like burning down a barn to roast a pig in the famous fable by Charles Lamb.12 Like redistributionism, antimonopolism cannot work at the national level in today’s system of liberalized trade and globalized production. If the Justice Department used antitrust to break up large suppliers in the US, firms that coordinate global supply chains could simply shift those links in production to foreign countries with more lenient competition policies. The result could be accelerated by American deindustrialization, with further massive shifts in employment from the traded sector to the low-wage, low-productivity domestic service sector.

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

Today, global communications means that new products can be conceived and built anywhere, and customers can discover them at an unprecedented pace. What’s more, individuals and small companies have unprecedented access to these new global systems, compared to a small number of owners of capital in the past. This setup flips Karl Marx’s old dictum on its head. What he called the means of production can now be rented. Entire global supply chains can be borrowed at little more than the marginal cost of the underlying products they produce. This dramatically lowers the initial capital costs required to try something new. In addition, the basis of competition is shifting. Today’s consumers have more choices and are more demanding. Technology trends reward businesses that have the broadest reach with near-monopoly-type power.

…

Once put into place, the system worked to prevent the kind of miscalculation and waste of resources that had previously occurred in the company. The structure that Alfred Sloan pioneered became the basis for all of twentieth-century general management. You can’t run a multiproduct, multidivision, multinational company and its attendant global supply chains without it. It is one of the true revolutionary ideas of the past one hundred years and is still widely in use today. Everyone knows the drill: beat your forecast, your stock goes up, you get promoted. Miss it and watch out. But when I first read this story, what went through my head was: You’re telling me that… once upon a time… people made forecasts… and they came true?

…

Why does it take so long to build this engine? I don’t want to undersell the technical challenges that led to the original five-year plan. The specifications required an audacious engineering effort that combined a difficult set of design parameters with the need for a new mass-production facility and global supply chain. A lot of brilliant people had done real, hard work to ensure that the plan was feasible and technically viable. But a large part of the technical difficulty of this project was driven by the specifications themselves. Remember that this product had to support five distinct uses in very different physical terrains (visualize how different the circumstances are at sea, in stationary drilling, on a train, for power generation, and in mobile fracking).

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

“The answer is to keep on fighting,” Kalpona Akter insists. “If you are always worrying about dying, you can’t live.” Activists know that their struggles have also brought change: wage increases, hours reductions, enhanced maternity leave, and investigations of labor conditions in complicated global supply chains. The geographic scope and scale of the protests, the vast numbers of people involved, the militancy and the courage of the protesters have been stunning. Many of those rising are the poorest of the poor, willing to risk what little they have for the next generation. We are witnessing the first truly global uprisings since the 1980s “People Power” movements that toppled Duvalier in Haiti, Marcos in the Philippines, Ershad in Bangladesh, and Communist dictatorships across Central and Eastern Europe.

…

The women “cook and eat together; they drink and have music—mini concerts or dances.” They are lonely and isolated, far from family and friends in their villages, Sok says. Workers need community before they can stand up for themselves. Finally, drop-in centers teach workers to understand global supply chains, says Sok. “We show them, this is the profit of Puma, Adidas, Walmart. This is what CEOs earn in a year. We take workers to other countries when we can, to meet people who make clothes there for the same companies. We take them window shopping to see the clothes and shoes they make. They learn what those cost in stores overseas compared to how much they make for sewing each item.

…

See also living wage movement Food Justice certification, 246 Food Policy Councils, 248 food-service workers, 79 Foxx, Anthony, 243 Frattini, Massimo, 21, 24, 27–28, 35, 56 freedom fighters, 75 freedom schools, 59 Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTU), 149, 153–54 Friedman, Thomas, 71 Gallin, Dan, 97 Gandhi, Mahatma, 89–91 Gap (clothing manufacturer), 152, 253 Garcia, Vicky Carlos, 13, 227–28, 230, 232–35, 237 garment industry: environmental costs, 127; ethical apparel manufacturing, 249–50; globalization of, 123–27, 139; profits and earnings, 164–65; “run-away shops,” 129; response to worker demands, 37, 145, 153–56, 171–73, 175; use of migrant workers, 161. See also export-processing zones (EPZs); specific garment factories garment workers: achievements, 172–73, 251–52; bravery in face of state violence, 154–56, 171–73; as contract workers, 177; costs of living, 132–33, 150; educating about global supply chains, 164; exposure to toxic chemicals, 2, 146, 160, 165, 251 factory fires, 136–39; and fast-fashion production techniques, 128; forced labor, 128; Girl Effect campaign/foundation, 130–31; global vision, 174; hunger and mental illness among, 146; identifying manufacturers, challenges of, 149–50; labor laws and protections, 169–70; living wage rallies, 173; minimum wage increases, 172; New York strike, 1909, 38; organizing strategies and actions, 39–41, 53–54, 121–22, 139–40, 148, 154; production quotas, 131; protests organized against the Tuba Group, 142–45; risks faced by, 37; and union tradition, 169; working conditions, 39–40, 119, 126–28, 132, 134, 149, 166–68, 170.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

You disrespect the very city that works day and night so that we may drink this. This miracle. This tea. As I played through this stage of the game, it brought to mind all the different workers and processes that must have come together across the world to allow the player to enjoy “this miracle.” The videogame, like the cup of tea, requires complex global supply chains and different kinds of labor to ensure the final object can be consumed by the player. Uncovering these supply chains today will take more than just studying the lines of an evil monologue. The first encounter with Karl Marx in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate takes place in the packed Whitechapel train station, somewhere I used to pass through daily in modern, real-life London.

…

The production of videogames today involves “the highly disciplined and exploitative control of its cognitariat workforce—increasingly prominent in cognitive capitalism generally.”1 In these pages, we identified new ways companies manage and exploit workers in the games studio, but we also explored the essential global supply chains that mix both material and immaterial production. As Ian Williams has argued, the “exploitation in the video game industry provides a glimpse at how the rest of us may be working in years to come.”2 We discussed this kind of work through Notes from Below’s class composition framework, understood as “a material relation with three parts: the first is the organisation of labour power into a working class (technical composition); the second is the organisation of the working class into a class society (social composition); the third is the self-organisation of the working class into a force for class struggle (political composition).”3 This allowed us to unpack the organization of videogame work.

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

By 1998: Michael Power, “Evaluating the Audit Explosion,” Law and Policy 25, no. 3 (July 2003); Timothy Lytton and Lesley McAllister, “Oversight in Private Food Safety Auditing: Addressing Auditor Conflict of Interest,” Wisconsin Law Review, April 7, 2014. $50 billion-per-year bucket that is the for-profit auditing industry: “Auditing Working Conditions: Breaking Through the Conspiracy of Silence,” Ethical Trade Initiative, 2015; Genevieve LeBaron, Jane Lister, and Peter Dauvergne, “Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability Through the Ethical Audit Regime,” Globalizations 14, no. 6 (2017). five main export facilities for seafood processor Thai Union: Andy Hall to author. Top standards organizations are issuing certifications . . . but . . . “the auditors who certified them were experts in car batteries: Richard Stiler, “Third Party Audits: What the Food Industry Really Needs,” Food Safety Magazine, October 2009.

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In the next audit, it needs to be 32 inches”—that was eventually resolved by hiring a former auditor as a consultant who recommended the factory “install two hooks and rotate the extinguisher back-and-forth.” Your private sector at work! Sonali Rammohan, “Toward a More Responsible Supply Chain: The HP Story,” Supply Chain Management Review, July 2009; Genevieve LeBaron, Jane Lister, and Peter Dauvergne, “Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability Through the Ethical Audit Regime,” Globalizations 14, no. 6 (2017). A date is set. Inspection questions previewed: As hinted in the text, the conflicts of interest here are truly impressive. The same auditing firm sent to evaluate the companies will also offer to help them prepare to ensure they will pass.

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Joe Fassier, “Welcome to Certification Nation,” New Food Economy, October 29, 2015; Richard Stier, “Third Party Audits: What the Food Industry Really Needs,” Food Safety Magazine, October 2009. They cannot open locked doors: Genevieve LeBaron, Jane Lister, and Peter Dauvergne, “Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability through the Ethical Audit Regime,” Globalizations 14, no. 6 (2017). Retail brands often give auditing firms strict instructions: Ibid. they are duty bound to tell only you: Ibid. Factory managers in China can buy software: Kathy Chu, “A Look at How Some Chinese Factories Lie to Pass Audits,” China Labor Watch, April 30, 2012.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

They tried to make the argument that this endless creation of new office jobs is actually necessary—it’s all because with complex global supply chains, production has become so digitized and efficient that we need many times more people to manage it. So bullshit jobs they claimed were the equivalent of the boring alienating factory job of the 1940s or 1950s, but they are also equally necessary. Our wealth depends on them. To which the obvious reply is: well then why is it happening at universities? What’s the academic equivalent of global supply chains, containerized shipping, Japanese style “just in time” production quotas? It is not like education or teaching at universities has become all that more complicated than it was 50 years ago.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It’s essentially a catchall term for all the various processes by which ideas, information, people, money, goods, and services cross international borders at unprecedented speed. Together, these processes have created a much more integrated global economy through trade, foreign direct investment, large-scale capital flows, the construction of global supply chains, innovation in communications technologies, and mass migration. None of these individual elements is entirely new. Global trade has existed for centuries. But the multiplier effect these forces create and the velocity with which they move make this phenomenon qualitatively different from anything that has come before.

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Some have predicted the rise of the “global citizen” as a challenge to the nation-state. The logic is simple: If you no longer depend for information on news sources broadcasting or publishing within one country, if you can quickly and easily form electronic social networks with people all over the world, if outsourcing and the advent of the global supply chain allow you to work for a company that is headquartered ten thousand miles from your home, if travel to foreign countries becomes ever easier and more affordable, and if more members of your family live and work elsewhere, won’t these globalization-generated changes weaken the ties that bind you to any one country?

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It’s the urban embodiment of an evolution from warehousing to distribution to logistics that took less than twenty years and saw it rise from a necessary evil to the front lines in an eternal war on costs and the competition. You can trace the shift in this thinking through title inflation, a local consultant explained. “When I started in the mid-eighties it was the ‘warehouse manager,’ ” he said. “Then it was the ‘assistant manager of logistics.’ Today, it’s the ‘SVP for global supply chain,’ and he might sit on the board of directors.” He or she likely sits on the boards of companies that decided they were better at logistics than anything else, such as Walmart, which achieves “everyday low prices” with a pythonlike squeeze on its suppliers. Everyone else, it seems, moved to Memphis or Louisville to let FedEx and UPS handle it for them.

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No one has ever tried to run a $16 billion company on Skype calls, e-mail, and the occa-sional Paris rendezvous until now. The company calls this “worldsourcing.” “It’s about leveraging the best people, processes, and costs, no matter where they’re located,” says Gerry Smith, the American running its global supply chain from Singapore. “I have staff in Shenzhen, Raleigh, Baddi [India], and Brazil. I’m a lonely figure in Singapore. I’m here because I have the best airport in the world; we don’t need a brick-and-mortar headquarters to make decisions.” Neither does anyone else. Consultancies like McKinsey and Accenture have long since jettisoned theirs, and scores of multinationals act like they already have.

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While Kasarda was still a student in 1968, he advanced the heretical idea that the size and reach of international trade and multinational firms had already surpassed the ability of any one nation to control them. The balance of power had been reversed; from now on, corporations would dictate the terms. Today, this is so patently true we have Tom Friedman’s “Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention,” which presupposes that no two countries with pieces of the same global supply chain—such as China, Taiwan, and Dell’s—will ever tempt economic suicide by warring. One of the main drivers behind the rise of multinationals and what Vernon called “globalism” was air travel, which “shrank the Atlantic crossing from four days to seven hours,” he wrote. “It turned transatlantic tourism from a rich man’s indulgence into a middle-class need.

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Just as it is possible to talk of win-win when things go well, it is also reasonable to see that it becomes a ‘lose-lose’ scenario when they do not. * The risks to the global economy in the event of a slowdown, correction or crash in China are obvious, given that China is ‘deeply embedded in global supply chains’, says the Bank of England report. There would be potential benefits – for example, a sharp reduction in some commodity prices like coal, steel and copper, as well as a fall in oil prices, leading to lower prices in the UK.129 Assessments like these presumably lie behind the aggressive stance on tariffs being adopted by the United States against China, with steps taken to put pressure on the economy to both weaken Beijing but strengthen consumers in the US at the same time.

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There would be potential benefits – for example, a sharp reduction in some commodity prices like coal, steel and copper, as well as a fall in oil prices, leading to lower prices in the UK.129 Assessments like these presumably lie behind the aggressive stance on tariffs being adopted by the United States against China, with steps taken to put pressure on the economy to both weaken Beijing but strengthen consumers in the US at the same time. It also explains the robust attempt by China not only to issue economic countermeasures but to warn of the dangers of playing a game the consequences of which are hard to predict. The United States is ‘attacking the global supply chain’, said Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gao Feng, when asked about the introduction of yet more tariffs. ‘The American government is firing shots at the whole world and at itself too.’130 In Britain’s case, as the Bank of England’s report makes clear, the prospect of lower prices in the event of a major financial crisis in China is only one side of the story.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

Take one of the major North American producers of mobile phones that started with basic manufacturing in China but, realizing the potential, rapidly moved their Chinese operations up the value chain to include designing both hardware and software. The company now has over 3,000 research engineers working in China who design and develop products for the global marketplace. We were told how the company had initially invested in manufacturing as part of plans to expand its global supply chain, but when senior American executives realized there were many talented engineers, they rapidly moved into leading-edge R&D. A Chinese manager based in Beijing observed how they moved from “coding work” and “customization” to research “fundamental architecture development, so we’ve created a lot of IPR [intellectual property rights] here in China.”

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These initiatives are intended to create a better system of checks and balances that recognizes the legitimate claims of all stakeholders—employees, managers, consumer, shareholders, and local communities—that must tackle the way companies excessively profit from the global auction at the expense of working families. There are other possibilities such as that proposed by Barry Lynn, where antitrust laws could be used so that no corporation controls more than a quarter of the American market. The sourcing of goods in the global supply chain could also be limited to only a quarter of products from any one country, which could lead to greater openness in the global economy with workers in many countries being able to gain from it.24 Justice: Beyond Human Capital A new bargain is also more than a matter of equalizing opportunities to join occupational elites even if, as we’ve argued, moving toward a level playing field in the competition for a livelihood is a key policy goal.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

David Lam, general partner at cross-border tech investment firm Atlantic Bridge, pointed out that any barrier is largely caused by politics. “Global supply chains are international, and the movement is unstoppable. It’s already happened. So it’s hard to turn back the clock. Some of the political leaders don’t necessarily share that view. They are the ones driving a lot of that policy and that does obviously create barriers, but they are more politically motivated than business motivated.” “Global supply chains are international, and the movement is unstoppable. It’s already happened. So it’s hard to turn back the clock.” David Lam General partner, Atlantic Bridge A US-China Venture Bridge Detours But the rifts are causing the bridge between Silicon Valley and China cross-border investing to be rerouted.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

One of the reasons that off-grid solar has taken off in East Africa is that tariffs and import duties there are relatively low, which enables Off-Grid Electric and other firms to import components of their solar systems from all over the world and move them freely between their bases of operation in Tanzania and Rwanda. In West Africa, by contrast, higher tariffs and duties make it more complicated and expensive to operate a global supply chain, ultimately raising the cost of off-grid solar. So a lesson for countries seeking to harness off-grid solar to improve domestic energy access is to tear down trade barriers that might artificially increase the cost of solar systems. Getting governments out of the way of innovation is a foundational requirement in order for public policy to enable off-grid solar deployment, but for the sector to flourish, it will need active support.

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And the United States should reduce trade barriers, opting instead to foster a globalized solar industry. These steps might appear to help the competition. But this is a competition that plays to U.S. strengths. Indeed, in other innovation-led industries, such as semiconductor manufacturing, U.S. firms command global supply chains and invest liberally in the next technology generation. The United States is fully capable of transforming solar—from how it is financed, to what it looks like, to how flexible the system that it plugs into is—and enjoying the benefits of doing so. President Trump should rethink his administration’s priorities.

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At the time of writing, the Trump administration was preparing to erect additional, sweeping trade barriers to imported silicon solar cells and panels from around the world, relying on the rarely invoked Section 201 of the 1974 Trade Act. But trade barriers are blunt, destructive tools that should be only a small component of America’s innovation strategy. Deployed recklessly, they can provoke trade wars that might stymie U.S. chances of taking the helm of an innovative industry with a global supply chain along which goods, services, and capital can flow efficiently across borders.51 Rather than retreating within its borders, America should embrace the chance to reshape the global solar industry in its innovative image. There are important differences between solar panels and semiconductors, and the business model of the latter may not translate exactly to the former.

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

There was some life to be found on the ring road outside of town: some barbecue and big-box stores, a Hooters. Downtown, I walked for blocks without seeing a soul. The windows were boarded over with plywood that glowed orange in the twilight. The Cotton Club, where Buddy Holly’s band used to play, was shut. Lubbock cotton now flows into the global supply chain with an eerie silence: no celebration amongst a community—no matter how flawed and blind to suffering—to see it off. Skip Notes * U.S. agricultural workers are at higher risk of fatal injury than workers in any other industry in the United States, higher than mining, construction, warehousing.

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* * * — In 2019 two Japanese brands, Muji and Uniqlo, came under fire for their ad campaign advertising the softness of the Xinjiang cotton in their flannel shirts. “What?! They’re actually using that as a slogan?!” fumed Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch. One Twitter user declared, “Many Uyghurs love and idolize Japan, but this is a betrayal.” The truth was, however, that Xinjiang cotton had spread so deeply in the global supply chain that there were few global brands that could have accurately claimed their clothes did not contain it. Xinjiang was by then the source of an estimated 20 percent of the world’s cotton. Because this cotton would be spun, knit, or sewn by an international web of producers, it was as likely to be present in a garment marked “Made in Vietnam” as in one marked “Made in China.”

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With this data, the most productive employees could be made to work during the busiest hours, and unproductive salespeople would see their hours cut. The name was important, one executive said, “because it gave a personality to the system, so [employees] hate the system and not us.” * * * — The global supply chain that brings us our clothing can seem intimidatingly complex. But what if it isn’t? Clothing brands farm out the making of goods to whomever in the world can do it most cheaply, and then divorce themselves in the eyes of customers from the facts on the ground. That’s pretty simple. The complexity only comes in when brands really need it to: to prove how many layers removed they are from the human lives being touched—sometimes lost—as a direct result of their purchase orders.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Natasha, a Turo renter and Airbnb customer, summed up the rhetoric: “We’re putting money right in the pocket of the community we were visiting, skipping the middle man. So that felt good.” Participants in the nonprofits also saw their activities as an alternative to capitalism, especially those in the time bank. Across both types of sites our informants criticized global supply chains, corporate conformity, and exploitative and alienating social relations. We found an inchoate but powerful nostalgia, in which the sharing economy was envisioned as a household space, what we term a “domestic imaginary.”40 Production takes place within the home, social relations are familial, and the aesthetic is cozy.

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I don’t feel like it really makes us happy and fulfills us in any way.” But it wasn’t only among time bankers that we heard these views. Food swappers think the food system is “insane.” Airbnb and Turo users talked about disliking chains and brand names. Respondents in multiple sites expressed their discomfort with global supply chains, sweatshops, and the environmental impacts of the consumer culture. Time banker Rachel believed that “we’re running out of resources and . . . it’s creating massive inequalities that are destabilizing our society and our democracy.” Why the Food Swap Failed: Snobbery and Social Exclusion Among our four sites the failure of the food swap was most spectacular.6 Why did things go awry for the well-meaning founders?

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

When General Motors and Chrysler flirted with collapse in 2009, one of the reasons for a government rescue was that jobs were also at risk at the companies that supplied parts (such as tyres or headlights) to the industry.46 The Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association (MEMA) estimated that, as of 2018, more than 871,000 American jobs were linked to the creation of cars and trucks.47 Furthermore, these supply chains are international. While it is common to talk of the US or German car industries, these manufacturers depend on global supply chains. Parts may cross international borders many times before they are assembled into the finished product.48 Perhaps 30–50% of the trade in manufactured goods occurs within individual multinational companies.49 As they became aware of this, many developing countries slashed their tariffs so that they could become part of these global value chains.

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In turn, this meant that manufacturing companies moved, since they no longer needed to rent expensive space in big cities in order to be near the docks. The result was a huge decline in blue-collar jobs in areas like Manhattan and east London. Without containerisation, it would be impossible to run the kind of global supply chains that multinationals operate. Indeed, it would also be impossible for companies to have low inventory levels; they can have minimal supplies of stocks because they know they can resupply themselves quickly. All this from the adoption of a humble metal box. Jet-setters If we could transport our great-great grandparents forward in time, what might surprise and alarm them most?

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Several executives were arrested in a corruption crackdown in 2015–17.10 In its earliest growth phase, China concentrated on the low-value goods where its low wages gave it a clear competitive advantage. By 1990, it had become the world’s largest textile exporter.11 Later on, the country moved into electronics and became a key part of the global supply chain. By 2018, China was home to more than half of the world’s manufacturing capacity for electronics. Foxconn, which is Apple’s largest supplier, employs 250,000 people in Shenzhen alone.12 When Lenovo, the Chinese technology group, bought IBM’s personal computer business in 2004, it seemed a symbolic power shift from west to east.

The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance From Scratch by Thomas Thwaites

Anthropocene, carbon footprint, global supply chain, invisible hand, lateral thinking, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Guided by my (evidently misguided) belief that cheapness begets simplicity, I chose as my exemplar toaster the: Argos Value Range 2-Slice White Toaster Cat. # 421/9608 £3.94 — Which includes: • Coolwall • Variable browning control • Mid-cycle cancel • Cord storage — A great value toaster, which embodies the centuries of incremental technological development, rising material wealth, and diverse global supply chains on which modern life depends. A must for any well-appointed kitchen! It doesn’t have a crumb tray, though. Rule 2. I must make all the parts of my toaster starting from scratch. What does from scratch mean? From scratch means making something starting from the very beginning. What does starting from the very beginning mean?

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

Once ensconced at LEGO, Knudstorp became a kind of at-large strategist who roved throughout the company, taking on different assignments as new challenges arose: collaborating with the management team of LEGOLAND to improve the theme parks’ performance, developing an action plan for building out the company’s nascent line of retail stores, deconstructing its global supply chain and recommending improvements. Acting on his belief that “relationships are just as important as results,” Knudstorp formed many critical ties across what was then a heavily compartmentalized organization. Within six months of arriving at LEGO, Knudstorp began reporting directly to the chief operating officer, Poul Plougmann.

…

As Knudstorp dug deeper into the LEGO Group’s malaise, he found the company’s problems were far more systemic than a falling U.S. currency and a failed Christmas. First and foremost, the company’s management team, which consisted of twelve senior vice presidents who oversaw six market regions as well as such traditional functions as the direct-to-consumer business and the global supply chain, was “highly dysfunctional,” recalled Knudstorp. “They didn’t work together. They operated in silos.” The chill from the executive suite often frosted the company’s retail partners, who regarded LEGO as aloof and largely uncaring. Knudstorp also found the company’s designers and developers chronically failed to grasp the business implications of their actions.

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

China’s government responded with purges and the firing of officials it thought stood in the way.16 As prison numbers swelled, the Chinese government began building new camps with even stricter security measures and more imposing architecture, including guard towers, heavy concrete walls, and giant iron doors at the entrance, usually patrolled by police with well-trained attack dogs. The camps were completed in six months, as opposed to the many years needed to build prisons. Some camps ran their own factories where inmates were forced to toil on garments and shoes, infecting the global supply chain with slave labor. Most were big enough to hold ten thousand prisoners each, according to a BuzzFeed investigation.17 By October 2018, I was back in Istanbul to pursue the story. Turkey was home to tens of thousands of Uyghur and Kazakh refugees from China, as both the Uyghurs and Kazakhs were Turkic ethnic groups.

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In 2018, three regions within Xinjiang forcefully transferred at least 570,000 people to do grueling cotton picking by hand for the bingtuan, Xinjiang’s paramilitary force.22 After the findings became public in December 2020, the United States banned cotton imports from the bingtuan, accusing it of “slave labor.”23 “The reported situation is of a scale, scope, and complexity that is unprecedented during the modern era of global supply chains,” the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a trade lobbying group consisting of leading clothing brands, announced in a statement with other industry groups, after the details of the labor transfers were made public. “Accepting the status quo is not an option.”24 [ ] In December 2017, the Communist Party began Becoming Family Week, a project that placed one million party cadres in Uyghur family households.

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy by Lawrence Ingrassia

air freight, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, data science, fake news, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Hacker News, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork

This has dramatically lowered one of the main barriers to entry that long posed an obstacle to entrepreneurs and safeguarded the incumbents that had built their own factories and employed legions of deeply knowledgeable specialists on their R&D teams. Companies have outsourced production for decades, but in recent times, the global supply chain has become more diverse and sophisticated than ever. An abundance of potential manufacturing partners, many with excess capacity, can be found in Asia, the shop floor to the world. If anything, the challenge isn’t so much finding a supplier as it is sifting through dozens of possible suppliers to find the right one.

…

“It’s much easier than ever to rapidly build a new disruptive company, at least in the early stages, with limited capital,” notes Christopher Rogers, an analyst for Panjiva, which tracks import data and helps identify suppliers for an astonishing number of products, and puts it all online. Founded in 2005, Panjiva is part of an intricate network of companies devoted to every link in the global supply chain of goods. Information on suppliers that once was available only to big companies because it was buried in raw customs import data that was hard to access and decipher has now been democratized. “Smaller companies didn’t used to have market intelligence,” says Rogers. “Now they do.” * * * In times past, the biggest bazaars had hundreds of physical stalls offering their wares.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

The Fukushima accident, compounded by damage to other electric generating plants in the area, led to power shortages, forcing rolling blackouts that demonstrated the vulnerability of modern society to a sudden shortage of energy supply. The effects were not limited to one country. The loss of industrial production in Japan disrupted global supply chains, halting automobile and electronics production in North America and Europe, and hitting the global economy. The accident at Fukushima threw a great question mark over the “global nuclear renaissance,” which many had thought essential to help meet the power needs of a growing world economy.

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American and European companies were setting up supply chains that gathered components from different parts of the world, assembled them in still other parts, and then packed the finished goods into containers and shipped them across oceans to customers anywhere in the world. Although China did not formally join the WTO until 2001, it had by then already become the linchpin in this new system of global supply chains. As factories went up all along the coastal region, the inscription “Made in China” became ubiquitous on all sorts of products shipped all over the world. China had now become what was said of Britain two centuries earlier—“the workshop of the world.” In due course, these new trade and investment linkages would have much greater impact on world energy than anyone might have imagined.

…

The huge earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011 killed more than 15,000 people, devastated a major part of the country, and set off a nuclear accident. It also took down the region’s power system, knocking out services, immobilizing communication and transportation, disrupting the economy and global supply chains, and paralyzing efforts to respond to the tragedy. In China, India, and other developing countries, chronic shortages of electric power demonstrate the costs of unreliability. The Internet and reliance on complex information-technology systems have created a whole new set of vulnerabilities for energy and electric power infrastructure around the world by creating entry paths for those who wish to disrupt those systems.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

More generally, even as they outsource the low-value-added manufacturing segments of the production chain, developed countries retain the high-value-added and profitable premanufacturing segments like R&D and the equally profitable post-manufacturing segments like marketing and finance.13 Such a division of labor is not unattractive to emerging markets that are trying to move up the complexity chain to build more technology-intensive products. Since the early 1990s, the possibility of participating in global supply chains has convinced a number of these countries to lower their tariffs, improve their business environment, sign treaties protecting foreign investment, and enhance their protection of intellectual property. This has eased the way for more segments of the value chain to be moved to emerging markets.

…

Initially, this has favored the highly educated and skilled in developed countries, much as has technological development. As emerging markets train their own people well (with students often finishing with an advanced degree from a developed country), capabilities are migrating to the rest of the world. The highly educated and skilled everywhere now compete for business from global supply chains. In some countries, their wage differential relative to others, while high, is plateauing or even falling.15 The losers are clearer: the moderately educated workers in developed countries. When the supply chain was entirely in the developed country, they benefited from the competitive edge that developed-country design or R&D gave them.

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Also, to the extent that countries continue adhering to international agreements when the government changes—which will be the case if there are significant costs to domestic industry of withdrawing from commitments—it gives firms across the world predictability of tariffs over time, and thus a stronger incentive to invest. As we have seen, such a low tariff regime has proven so attractive that a number of emerging markets have lowered tariffs significantly so that their producers can become part of global supply chains. All this is to suggest that we should resist the populist nationalist turn to protectionism, and redouble our efforts to lower tariffs globally. The merits of cross-border flows other than those of goods and services are more uncertain and contingent on circumstances. As a series of financial crises have shown us, capital flows into a country are not an unmitigated blessing, especially if the flows are short-term in nature, and the country has poorly developed financial markets and institutions.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Their energy infrastructure is old, and energy and climate policy have made solar and wind power cost-competitive. As their coal power plants are nearing their end of life, and since energy use is stable, the deployment of solar and wind power in these countries is largely replacing their ageing energy infrastructure. Meanwhile, they are also taking advantage of global supply chains, whereby the import of consumable goods means there is less pressure placed on the energy system and emissions. Middle- and low-income countries have a different reality. Living standards are, at the aggregate level, considerably lower than in Europe and the US. To improve them, energy use is growing rapidly.

…

For some, this has brought the possibility of commuting long distances to work; for others, opportunities to undertake their education in a different country or go on holiday overseas. Technological advances in vehicles have also transformed trade: while international trade by sea has a long history, the things we consume today have complex global supply chains, and many of us are accustomed to having products arrive from a faraway origin sometimes just hours after we’ve ordered them. Yet for all the benefits that transport offers, it has significant and wide-ranging impacts on the environment. Extracting resources to make roads and railways, bikes and heavy goods vehicles, requires energy, generates pollution and often harms biodiversity.

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There it was, an enormous dark green ship stuck in the desert, the word ‘EVERGREEN’ painted in gigantic white letters across the hull, while a lonely excavator chipped away at the vast shoreline. It was the perfect image for our modern world: the 400-metre-long vessel, leased by a Taiwanese shipping company and registered in Panama for tax reasons, which single-handedly brought global supply chains and large parts of the world’s trade to a one-week standstill. The Ever Given was on its way from China and Malaysia to the Netherlands, carrying some 18,000 containers filled with whatever stuff containers are filled with – electronics, household products, footwear, fast fashion, mountain bikes, outdoor furniture, barbecues, and so on.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

There are now fewer than 2,000 factories employing more than 200 workers and about one third of manufacturing jobs are in foreign owned companies. Foreign ownership can be a great blessing—just think of Nissan in Sunderland—but foreign owned companies often have ‘ambitions limited by their role in global supply chains … and small UK manufacturers are routinely exposed to the sourcing decisions of overseas multinationals and the vagaries of economic decisions that are beyond their control,’ as the CRESC ‘Rebalancing’ paper referred to earlier puts it.48 Of course any modern economy has to be a relatively open one—consider how when the pound fell after the Brexit vote the FTSE100 share index rose because so many of those big companies’ earnings and assets are in dollars or Euros which are now more valuable in relation to sterling.

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Meanwhile, the rapidity of industrial decline has created so-called ‘broken supply chains’, meaning even successful manufacturers have to source most of the product from elsewhere. JCB, often cited as a great British success story, has seen the British content of its diggers decline from almost 100 per cent in 1979 to about one third today. Similarly Dyson vacuum cleaners outsources everything except design. Global supply chains are a common feature of today’s global companies but according to CRESC British manufacturers import far more than their German counterparts.50 The Dyson effect can deliver dynamism, but only in a few pockets as British industry returns to a small workshop base last seen in the early stages of the industrial revolution—and such units are too small to combat weak export performance or high import penetration.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

By the time it arrived in Europe, it collided with a society made vulnerable by the horrific conditions wrought by feudalism—famine, poverty, slavery, and the roving armies of the Hundred Years’ War. Plague killed a staggering fifty million people, wiping out almost one-half of Europe’s population. Likewise, COVID-19 traversed the circuits of capital of the world economy, emanating from the major trading and travel hubs and passing through labor-intensive nodes in the global supply chain—warehouses, rail stations, air- and seaports, and the rest stops in between.18 Wuhan itself is often dubbed the Chicago of China because its airport, like bustling O’Hare, is a way station for so much domestic and international travel. The virus ripped across China in a few days, and within two months it was active in seventy-five countries.19 As the plague shows us, there have been pandemics across social systems; they’re not particular to capitalism.

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In the meantime, in search of cheaper labor, many of the major domestic PPE producers, like 3M and Honeywell, outsourced their production to Asia. This meant that when we desperately needed PPE, we had to import it. More than any rich country in the world, we were suddenly hyper-reliant on a smooth and functioning global supply chain, which did not exist. China was the largest exporter, but its own stock was rapidly depleting, given that the outbreak happened there first. It also didn’t help that the Trump administration had started a trade war with that country not long before, fracturing international relations. The one major PPE producer that remained in the US, Halyard Health, developed technology to make 1.5 million N95s per day, ten times the going rate and seemingly enough to satisfy the predicted surge demand in the event of a US outbreak.24 But the Trump administration chose not to fund the project.

Making a Killing: The Deadly Implications of the Counterfeit Drug Trade by Roger Bate

global supply chain, interchangeable parts, RFID, Sam Peltzman, supply-chain management

Many have begun to implement track-and-trace technology on their drugs to provide an effective “e-pedigree” to distributors and consumers. Some have experimented with using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to check the e-pedigrees of drug shipments, although, in the United States, this is not yet required by the FDA.101 To help secure the complex, vulnerable global supply chain, many drug companies have implemented their own security measures. Pfizer announced in December 2003 that all distributors in the United States selling its products would have to purchase them directly from the company or from selected wholesalers.102 In September 2006, Pfizer announced that it would cease selling drugs to eighteen wholesalers in the United Kingdom and instead distribute drugs there only through UniChem.103 These moves are attempts to cut down the size of the secondary wholesale market, which includes sales among wholesalers.104 Other pharmaceutical firms will need to secure their own supply chains and alert the public when they become aware of counterfeit drugs.

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing) by John E. Kelly Iii

AI winter, book value, call centre, carbon footprint, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, demand response, discovery of DNA, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of work, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Internet of things, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, natural language processing, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Feynman, smart grid, smart meter, speech recognition, TED Talk, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

VARIETY Over the past decade or so, computer scientists and mathematicians have become quite proficient at handling specific types of data by using specialized tools that do one thing very well. For example, a sales manager can employ data analytics software to reveal past sales trends and forecast future sales, using a specific tool for a specific data type. But that approach doesn’t work for complex operational challenges such as managing cities, global supply chains, or power grids, where many interdependencies exist and many different kinds of data have to be taken into consideration. What’s required is a holistic approach to data management and analysis. You have to be able to mash together different kinds of data and act on them with different kinds of tools.

Freedom by Daniel Suarez

augmented reality, big-box store, British Empire, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, corporate personhood, digital map, game design, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Naomi Klein, new economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, private military company, RFID, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, the scientific method, young professional

"We also project reductions in export crops such as cotton in Asia and Russia. Security services in various countries are reporting labor unrest in both the agricultural and industrial sectors. The number of container ships being placed into warm and cold layup from lack of cargo is rising." It's tearing apart the global supply chain. Staring at the screen, The Major could visualize it like a full-scale nuclear attack. But one that the average person wouldn't notice--until it was beyond the tipping point. The British chap took over. "We project that if corn and soybean harvests drop another seven percent, raw material costs for almost all processed food products will skyrocket.

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My family's been doing industrial farming for forty years and all it produces is debt, pollution, and water shortages. It ruins the land and the people on it." Ross nodded to the uniform fields out the window. "You think these other farmers will change?" "They'll have no choice. Gas is, what--eighteen bucks a gallon now? Industrial farming and the global supply chain gobble up fossil fuel." He peeled off each item with his fingers. "Natural gas in the fertilizers, petroleum-based pesticides, fuel for the tractors, more fuel for transport to food processors, fuel to process the raw crops into food additives, then to manufacture them into products, and then to transport the products across the country or world to be consumed--thirteen hundred miles on average."

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

‘But I’m not sure what will happen if I plug it into the mains.’ Eventually, he summoned up the courage to do so. Two seconds later, the toaster was toast. 2 Problem solving in a complicated world The modern world is mind-bogglingly complicated. Far simpler objects than a toaster involve global supply chains and the coordinated efforts of many individuals, scattered across the world. Many do not even know the final destination of their efforts. As a lumberjack fells a giant of the Canadian forest, he doesn’t know whether the tree he topples will make bed frames or pencils. At the vast Chuquicamata mine in Chile, a yellow truck the size of a house growls up an incline blasted into the landscape; the driver does not trouble himself to ask whether the copper ore he carries is destined for the wiring of a toaster or the casing of a bullet.

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It’s probably a safe bet that cars would become more efficient, buildings would be built with more insulation and passive heating and cooling systems, and that we’d see more use of technologies such as nuclear, hydroelectric and even ‘carbon capture’ – preventing carbon dioxide emerging from a coal-fired power station. But what other changes we might see, who knows? Global supply chains might be reconfigured. Hundreds of millions of people might move to places where the climate or the geography allows a more energy-efficient lifestyle. Or world-saving ideas could emerge from even more unexpected sources. If there was some way to reduce the methane being belched out by cows and sheep – almost a tenth of the total contribution to greenhouse gas emissions – then that would be a huge achievement.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

South Korea, Brazil, and Turkey were the best examples of countries following such policies. In the 1990s, with the second globalization, things changed. What has become crucial for the success of developing countries is no longer to develop through various predetermined stages using their own economic policies, but to become part of the global supply chains organized by the center (the Global North). And moreover, not merely to go into higher value-added stages by copying what richer countries are doing, but, as China is doing now, to become technological leaders themselves. The second unbundling has made it possible to skip the stages that were earlier thought necessary.

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As recently as the 1980s, it was unthinkable that countries that were overwhelmingly rural and poor, like India and China, would within two or three generations become technological leaders, or at least come close to the production possibility frontier in some areas. Thanks to their insertion into global supply chains, it became a reality. The way to interpret Asia’s success in the current era is not by seeing China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and so on as the latest versions of South Korea. They are the trailblazers of a new road to development which, through integrating one’s economy to the developed world, leapfrogs over several technological and institutional stages.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

But more often than not, large companies tend to use their clout to entrench their own dominance. Thanks to their wealth and global distribution, these companies have access to resources that remain out of reach for their smaller competitors. Large firms can use the offshore financial system to optimize their tax bills. They can leverage global supply chains and labor markets to lower costs. They can wage effective influence campaigns to win over policy makers. They can weather price wars, raise barriers to entry, and buy out would-be rivals before they get off the ground. They have access to larger data sets that they can use to optimize against smaller rivals.

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Different cultures require different business strategies, different customer experiences, and different government relations. If companies do not learn how to do business in different cultural contexts, they will fail. Multinational companies must also develop something of an intelligence apparatus to help them see around the corner. In today’s global supply chains, civil unrest in southeast Asia could impact sales in North America and civil unrest in North America could impact sales in Europe. Effective geopolitical forecasting could make a significant difference to a company’s bottom line. At the same time, companies on the global stage now need to know how to defend themselves when it comes to cybersecurity.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

Many developing countries also lack the ability—or have been told they don’t have the ability—to produce enough food, energy, and medicine to meet their own domestic demand. So, they rely on developed countries to supply them with imports of food, energy, and medicine. And, as we’ve discussed, they almost always need US dollars to pay for those crucial imports. As MMT economist Fadhel Kaboub has argued, this position at the bottom of global supply chains brings fundamental economic problems—many of them arising from the historical legacy of colonization itself.23 Exporting cheap labor and commodities, while importing expensive high-value items, tends to leave developing countries with perpetual trade deficits. The problem is that there isn’t a robust, permanent appetite for developing countries’ financial assets or real estate.

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US Department of Labor, “Trade Adjustment Assistance for Workers” (webpage), www.doleta.gov/tradeact/. 15. Candy Woodall, “Harley-Davidson Workers Say Plant Closure after Tax Cut Is Like a Bad Dream,” USA Today, May 27, 2018, updated May 28, 2018, www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/05/27/harley-davidson-layoffs/647199002/. 16. Committee on Decent Work in Global Supply Chains, “Resolution and Conclusions Submitted for Adoption by the Conference,” International Labour Conference, ILO, 105th Session, Geneva, May–June 2016, www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_norm/---relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_489115.pdf. 17. Office of the Historian, “Nixon and the End of the Bretton Woods System, 1971–1973,” Milestones: 1969–1976, history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/nixon-shock. 18.

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Powell imagined an increasingly likely scenario: desolate shopping malls, kids home from school early, the TV playing reruns of past NBA finals. This was looking less like Y2K—the classic example of the government over-preparing for a calamity that never materialized—and more like a significant and sustained shock to the economy. The Fed was facing two distinct economic problems. As workplaces shuttered and global supply chains became squeezed, the first was a jolt to the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services, or its supply side. Lower interest rates couldn’t do much about that. But the Fed could help alleviate the second problem, a demand shock, in which households and businesses hold off on spending or investment.

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Rental-car companies, which had liquidated their idle fleets to pay debts during the lockdowns, suddenly needed more vehicles, sending used-car prices skyrocketing. Cargo ships idled outside ports, with containers piling up on the docks or in warehouses. Lumber prices spiked. It was a sign of the global supply chain in disarray. These and other commodities caused measures of inflation to jump, generating rumblings of discontent against the Fed and the administration’s stimulus policies. Powell sought to preempt worries about higher inflation and described them as transitory. First, prices had plunged early in the pandemic, so as those declines dropped out of the twelve-month rates of change, the year-over-year comparisons would jump, exaggerating actual pressures.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

My comments were greeted with widespread skepticism and even derision. “Not in our lifetime” came the retort from the oil industry, as well as most geologists and economists. Shortly thereafter, the price of oil dramatically rose. When the price went over $70 per barrel in mid-2007, the price of products and services across the entire global supply chain began to rise as well, for the simple reason that virtually every commercial activity in our global economy is dependent on oil and other fossil fuel energies.5 We grow our food in petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. Most of our construction materials—cement, plastics, and so on—are made of fossil fuels, as are most of our pharmaceutical products.

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Millions of people all over the world were more than happy to provide the goods and produce the services in return for our dollars. The global buying spree and the dramatic rise in aggregate output that accompanied it pushed up the demand for an ever-dwindling oil supply, resulting in a steep increase in prices on world markets. The sharp acceleration in the price of oil triggered price hikes across the global supply chain for everything from grain to gasoline, finally leading to a worldwide collapse of purchasing power when oil hit a record $147 per barrel in July 2008. Sixty days later, the banking community, awash in unpaid loans, shut off credit; the stock market crashed, and globalization came to a standstill.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

China is predicted to surpass even US R&D spending in the coming years. Of course, it’s not just what is spent or the number of patents filed that determines innovation. It’s how useful these inventions are. And that data does not yet exist for China. To complicate matters, much manufacturing now involves global supply chains. For instance, half of China’s exports are made by foreign-invested enterprises, so it’s multinational companies that are producing in China as well as domestic firms. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik estimated that the value of Chinese exports suggests that they come from a country with a much higher per capita income.

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The statistics tell the story: in 2011 just 6 per cent of the population had access to a mobile device and only about 10 per cent had a bank account. Decades of military rule have left Myanmar underdeveloped and one of the poorest countries in Asia. But that also means that, with the right sorts of institutional reforms, it has significant potential to grow quickly. It sits in the world’s fastest-growing region with well-established global supply chains, which can help an economy industrialize and grow rapidly if it is part of the worldwide manufacturing network. Unlike many smaller countries in developing Asia, Myanmar, with a population similar in size to that of South Korea, can utilize a significant home market to promote growth as well as expand its exports.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

China is predicted to surpass even US R&D spending in the coming years. Of course, it’s not just what is spent or the number of patents filed that determines innovation. It’s how useful these inventions are. And that data does not yet exist for China. To complicate matters, much manufacturing now involves global supply chains. For instance, half of China’s exports are made by foreign-invested enterprises, so it’s multinational companies that are producing in China as well as domestic firms. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik estimated that the value of Chinese exports suggests that they come from a country with a much higher per capita income.

…

The statistics tell the story: in 2011 just 6 per cent of the population had access to a mobile device and only about 10 per cent had a bank account. Decades of military rule have left Myanmar underdeveloped and one of the poorest countries in Asia. But that also means that, with the right sorts of institutional reforms, it has significant potential to grow quickly. It sits in the world’s fastest-growing region with well-established global supply chains, which can help an economy industrialize and grow rapidly if it is part of the worldwide manufacturing network. Unlike many smaller countries in developing Asia, Myanmar, with a population similar in size to that of South Korea, can utilize a significant home market to promote growth as well as expand its exports.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Colonialism requires an infra structure that facilitates the movement of resources, and what makes the Cloud Empire colonial is the scale and scope of this worldwide network of extraction and distribution, which is managed through increasingly sophisticated logistics. And we should not forget the debt that the concept and sometimes the practice of logistics owes to the military spirit. The smooth movement of resources along global supply chains is a movement in which corporations and armies have often supported each other during colonial times. To be sure, Amazon does not require its own army, like the East India Company did. But as Deborah Cowen argues, logistics “[map] the form of contemporary imperialism,”7 and as Ned Rossiter points out, “Increasingly, logistics infrastructure is managed through computational systems of code and software,”8 that is, through data.

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In another sense, the kinds of changes that—in the West, at least—neoliberalism advocated or celebrated (the “liberalization” of trade and markets, the emergence of global financial markets, and the huge growth of the personal finance sector) were among the practical preconditions for data colonialism.13 Indeed, the tools of data colonialism (such as Machine Learning) emerged in part as solutions to the practical challenges thrown up by the need, for example, to manage complex global supply chains and massively accelerating financial flows. Both contextualizations are, in our view, important. Whether we see the emergence of the Cloud Empire more in terms of continuities or as a decisive break from what preceded it, its strategic importance in capitalism’s history remains clear. The Cloud: From Metaphor to Episteme Today’s data empires are not necessarily interested in land, but they are interested—at least allegorically—in air.

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Fearing that Chinese leaders would feel emboldened by perceived American military weakness, the United States sent two aircraft carriers to the region to engage in exercises with India, Japan, and Australia. In response to increased Chinese assertiveness, nations are taking steps to restructure global supply chains for critical technologies. India, Japan, and Australia launched a trilateral supply chain resilience initiative to reduce their dependence on China. As part of its economic stimulus, the Japanese government allocated $2.2 billion to incentivize companies to move production out of China. The French government began working with French pharmaceutical companies to re-shore production.

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News & World Report, June 16, 2020, https://www.usnews.com/news/world-report/articles/2020-06-16/dozens-killed-as-india-china-face-off-in-first-deadly-clash-in-decades. 76dismantle Hong Kong’s freedoms: Laignee Barron, “How Beijing’s National Security Crackdown Transformed Hong Kong in a Single Month,” Time, August 4, 2020, https://time.com/5874901/hong-kong-national-security-law-timeline/. 76incursions across the midline of the Taiwan Strait: Sara Zheng, “Fighter Jets Cross a Line in Taiwan Strait, Says Taipei as It Hosts US Health Official Amid Rising US-China Tension,” South China Morning Post, August 10, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3096776/fighter-jets-cross-line-taiwan-strait-says-taipei-it-hosts-us; “Taiwan Scrambles Fighters as Chinese Jets Again Fly Near Island,” Reuters, September 19, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/19/taiwan-scrambles-fighters-as-chinese-jets-again-fly-near-island.html; Brad Lendon, “Almost 40 Chinese warplanes Breach Taiwan Strait Median Line; Taiwan President Calls It a ‘Threat of Force,’” CNN, September 21, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/21/asia/taiwan-china-warplanes-median-line-intl-hnk-scli/index.html. 76United States sent two aircraft carriers to the region: Sanjeev Miglani, “U.S. Holds Naval Exercises with Allies in Asia amid China Tension,” Reuters, July 21, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-usa/u-s-holds-naval-exercises-with-allies-in-asia-amid-china-tension-idUSKCN24M0RB. 76restructure global supply chains: Katrin Hille, “US and Taiwan to Work on Reshaping Supply Chains Away from China,” Financial Times, September 4, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/64be66cd-91eb-4862-a8fe-7c998b2e4770. 76trilateral supply chain resilience initiative: Dipanjan Roy Chaudhurhy, “India-Japan-Australia Decide to Launch Resilient Supply Chain Initiative in the Indo-Pacific Region,” Economic Times, September 2, 2020, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/india-japan-australia-decide-to-launch-resilient-supply-chain-initiative-in-the-indo-pacific-region/articleshow/77870346.cms. 76$2.2 billion to incentivize companies: David Arase, “Tokyo Prods Japanese Firms to Leave China,” interview by Mercy A.

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Hikvision is a socially-responsible company. Our mission is to keep people, organizations, and property safe and secure. We are proud that our company is trusted in Europe and we will continue to invest in Europe’s security. We are confident in our business continuity plan that ensures the sustainability of our global supply chain and we have the capability to continuously provide quality products to our valued partners and customers in Europe.” (“Hikvision Europe’s statement regarding the U.S. Commerce Department’s decision,” Hikvision, n.d., https://www.hikvision.com/europe/newsroom/latest-news/2019/hikvision-europe-s-statement-regarding-the-u-s--commerce-departm/.)

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

The solution to our problems was to erect physical barriers between us and the world as well as metaphorical barriers between Americans, as populists will do. Our multilateral trade deals were suddenly the worst deals in the history of mankind, and other countries were benefiting and we had been left holding the bag—when in truth, all of the countries engaged in trade were doing better. Efficient and truly global supply chains mean that the component parts of an “American” car sometimes cross four or five borders—or our own borders four or five times—before that car rolls off the assembly line. Specialization, modernization, and mechanization mean a better standard of living for everyone and make for a more peaceful world as well.

Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game